VIEWS AND REVIEWS 



VIEWS 
AN D REVIEWS 

BY 

HENRY JAMES 

NOW FIRST COLLECTED 



INTRODUCTION BY 

LE ROY PHILLIPS 

COMPILER OF 

1 A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS 

OF HENRY JAMES " 



BOSTON 

THE BALL PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1908 



IUBKARY of CONFESS 
Two Copies neo -,_>. 

MAY 15 iy08 



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Copyright, iqo8 
By The Ball Publishing Co. 



INTRODUCTION 

Those whose palates are accustomed to the subtle 
flavours of the wines of the Rhine and Moselle can 
smack their lips and name the vintage at the first 
taste. Likewise any one fairly familiar with the 
work of Mr. James during his forty years of liter- 
ary activity can 9 after the reading of a single page 
taken at random, judge with a remarkable accu- 
racy the date of its composition. Yet the transi- 
tion has not been abrupt and the styles of writing 
which the author has adopted, early, middle and 
late, have blended in such a way that he has been 
bringing many of his earlier readers, though some 
have fallen by the wayside, along with him to a 
genuine appreciation of his present work. 

It is not unnatural but disappointing that those 
of the present generation who chance to meet Mr. 
James in one of the later novels are not as likely 
to seek a second volume as those who read Daisy 
Miller some thirty years ago when that study first 
appeared, so fresh in its note of charm and pathos, 
in the now almost unflndable brown wrappers of 



vi INTRODUCTION 

Harper's Half Hour Series, for they may forever 
miss a rare enjoyment. 

In the critical papers which make up the con- 
tents of this book, the characteristics of the au- 
thor's later style are wholly absent. Without the 
date of the original appearance of these essays in 
periodical form being indicated, the chronological 
setting of this work is apparent. No sentences 
with marvelously intricate complications of con- 
struction and with expressions involved are in the 
author's method at this time, while for clearness 
and charm these views and reviews are admirable 
specimens, showing qualities which brought Mr. 
James his early readers and first made his name 
an essential feature of the announcements of pub- 
lishers of the more discriminating periodicals forty 
years ago. 

The earliest authenticated magazine article by 
Mr. James — printed when he was twenty-one — 
is a critical notice of Nassau W. Senior's Essays 
on Fiction in The North American Review for Oc- 
tober, 186%,, From this time until the appearance 
of his first volume — A Passionate Pilgrim and 
Other Tales, Boston: 1875 — as many as one hun- 
dred and twenty-five serious literary notices con- 
tributed to periodicals can be traced to him. 

During this period it must also be remembered 
that Mr. James was equally employed in writing 
short stories, art criticism and notes of travel, both 



INTRODUCTION vii 

at home and abroad, and that these were also dis- 
tinctive features of the widely scattered journals 
in which they appeared. 

In The North American Review, The Atlantic 
Monthly, The Galaxy, Lippincott's Magazine, The 
New York Tribune, The Independent and some 
other periodicals, the authorship of such work was 
attributed to Mr. James on the publication of the 
articles or in regularly issued indexes. 

The articles in The Nation are seldom signed, 
and there is no published index showing the con- 
tributors to its files. In preparing a recent 1 Bibli- 
ography of the writings of Henry James I had 
access to a record which the late Wendell Phillips 
Garrison, who was Mr. Godkin's associate from the 
founding of the paper and after 1881 editor m 
charge until June 28, 1906, had carefully kept of 
every author's work which his paper had published 
since its first issue. The amount of matter which 
Mr. James had provided, and the variety of inter- 
ests concerning which he wrote, made an amazing 
array of notes. It is from the early issues of The 
Nation that much of the contents of this volume is 
reprinted. Of Mr. James's contributions to periodi- 
cals those to this paper were perhaps the most 
notable as well as the most frequent. He was 



X 'A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James. Bos- 
ton and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906. 



viti INTRODUCTION 

represented in its first number — July 6, 1865 — 
by some critical notes on Henry W. Kingsley's 
novel, " The Hillyars and the Bartons : A Story 
of Two Families," under the title, " The Noble 
School of Fiction," and the name " Henry James " 
appears in the publisher's announced list of con- 
tributors to the early volumes. Many of these pa- 
pers which first appeared in The Nation have been 
reprinted, but few readers at this distance can 
realize how much the esteem in which that journal 
was immediately held under the editorial supervision 
of Mr. Godkin was due to perhaps its youngest 
regular contributor. 

Volumes of the collected critical papers have 
already appeared, — French Poets and Novelists, 
London: 1878, and Partial Portraits, London: 
1888, are the more notable, — but by far the 
greater part of these contemporary Essays on the 
literature of the late sixties and the seventies are 
now almost lost in the files of old or extinct periodi- 
cals. 

We are accustomed these later years to thmk of 
Mr. James as novelist rather than literary essayist 
and he has been cited by a recent writer as an 
author of fiction who becomes a critic pn occasion 
and, he also adds, that his analytical system of 
novel writing excellently fits him for the office of 
critic; but, on the contrary, the papers in this vol- 
ume seem to show that his early self-trainmg as a 



INTRODUCTION ix 

critic has been the preparation for the creation of 
his characters in fiction. 

The true lover of Mr. James's work feels the 
same delightful sense of intimate discovery in 
touching these early papers that an artist does 
in finding a portfolio of early sketches by a beloved 
master whose developed power and strength is 
known to him. There is the recognition of the 
characteristic touch even here — the insight, the 
thought within a thought, (more lately the des- 
pair of privileged psychologic athletes), the mys- 
tery of seeing — not what is apparent to the 
outward eye but what we fancied we concealed suc- 
cessfully within our inmost selves. There is the 
extraordinary sense of his having put on paper 
what we really thought — what we now think — 
that gives us more faith than ever in our artist 
who is expression for us who feel, but who are yet 
dumb. 

LE ROY PHILLIPS. 

Boston, April 10, 1908. 



CONTENTS 

Page 
The Novels of George Eliot 1 

On a Drama of Robert Browning 41 

Swinburne's Essays 51 

The Poetry of William Morris 

I. The Life and Death of Jason ... 63 

II. The Earthly Paradise 71 

Matthew Arnold's Essays 83 

Mr. Walt Whitman 101 

The Poetry of George Eliot . 

I. The Spanish Gypsy 113 

II. The Legend of Jubal 138 

The Limitations of Dickens 153 ' 

Tennyson's Drama 

I. Queen Mary 165 

II. Harold 196 

Contemporary Notes on Whistler vs. Ruskin 

I. The Suit for Libel 207 

II. Mr. Whistler's Rejoinder 211 

A Note on John Burroughs 217 

Mr. Kipling's Early Stories 225 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 



Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, Oc- 
tober, 1866. 

This essay was written in 1866 before Middlemarch 
or Daniel Deronda had appeared. The former work 
was published in 1871-72 and the latter book in 1876. 
It was afterwards discussed at length by Mr. James in 
" Daniel Deronda : a Conversation," originally contrib- 
uted to the Atlantic Monthly, December, 1876, and re- 
printed in 1888 in Partial Portraits, 



VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 

THE critic's first duty in the presence of an 
author's collective works is to seek out some 
key to his method, some utterance of his literary 
convictions, some indication of his ruling theory. 
The amount of labour involved in an inquiry of 
this kind will depend very much upon the author. 
In some cases the critic will find express declara- 
tions ; in other cases he will have to content himself 
with conscientious inductions. In a writer so fond 
of digressions as George Eliot, he has reason to 
expect that broad evidences of artistic faith will 
not be wanting. He finds in Adam Bede the fol- 
lowing passage: — 

" Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating 
violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light; 
paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild 
face upward, and opening her arms to welcome the 
divine glory ; but do not impose on us any aesthetic 
rules which shall banish from the region of art 
those old women scraping carrots with their work- 
worn hands, — those heavy clowns taking holiday 

1 



2 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

in a dingy pot-house, — those rounded backs and 
stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the 
spade and done the rough work of the world, — 
those homes with their tin cans, their brown 
pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of 
onions. In this world there are so many of these 
common, coarse people, who have no picturesque, 
sentimental wretchedness. It is so needful we 
should remember their existence, else we may hap- 
pen to leave them quite out of our religion and phi- 
losophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit 
a world of extremes. . . . 

" There are few prophets in the world, — few sub- 
limely beautiful women, — few heroes. I can't 
afford to give all my love and reverence to such 
rarities; I want a great deal of those feelings for 
my every-day fellowmen, especially for the few 
in the foreground of the great multitude, whose 
faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I 
have to make way with kindly courtesy. . . . 

"I herewith discharge my conscience/ ' our au- 
thor continues, "and declare that I have had quite 
enthusiastic movements of admiration toward old 
gentlemen who spoke the worst English, who were 
occasionally fretful in their temper, and who had 
never moved in a higher sphere of influence than 
that of parish overseer ; and that the way in which 
I have come to the conclusion that human nature 
is loveable — the way I have learnt something of 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 3 

its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries — has been 
by living a great deal among people more or less 
commonplace and vulgar, of whom you would per- 
haps hear nothing very surprising if you were to 
inquire about them in the neighbourhoods where 
they dwelt." 

But even in the absence of any such avowed 
predilections as these, a brief glance over the prin- 
cipal figures of her different works would assure 
us that our author's sympathies are with common 
people. Silas Marner is a linen-weaver, Adam 
Bede is a carpenter, Maggie Tulliver is a miller's 
daughter, Felix Holt is a watchmaker, Dinah Mor- 
ris works in a factory, and Hetty Sorrel is a dairy- 
maid. Esther Lyon, indeed, is a daily governess; 
but Tito Melema alone is a scholar. In the Scenes 
of Clerical Life, the author is constantly slipping 
down from the clergymen, her heroes, to the most 
ignorant and obscure of their parishioners. Even 
in Romola she consecrates page after page to the 
conversation of the Florentine populace. She is as 
unmistakably a painter of bourgeois life as Thack- 
eray was a painter of the life of drawing-rooms. 

Her opportunities for the study of the manners 
of the solid lower classes have evidently been very 
great. We have her word for it that she has lived 
much among the farmers, mechanics, and small 
traders of that central region of England which 
she has made known to us under the name of Loam- 



4 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

shire. The conditions of the popular life in this 
district in that already distant period to which 
she refers the action of most of her stories — the 
end of the last century and the beginning of the 
present — were so different from any that have been 
seen in America, that an American, in treating 
of her books, must be satisfied not to touch upon 
the question of their accuracy and fidelity as pic- 
tures of manners and customs. He can only say 
that they bear strong internal evidence of truth- 
fulness. 

If he is a great admirer of George Eliot, he 
will indeed be tempted to affirm that they must 
be true. They offer a completeness, a rich density 
of detail, which could be the fruit only of a long 
term of conscious contact, — such as would make 
it much more difficult for the author to fall into 
the perversion and suppression of facts, than to 
set them down literally. It is very probable that 
her colours are a little too bright, and her shadows 
of too mild a gray, that the sky of her landscapes 
is too sunny, and their atmosphere too redolent of 
peace and abundance. Local affection may be ac- 
countable for half of this excess of brilliancy ; the 
author's native optimism is accountable for the 
other half. 

I do not remember, in all her novels, an in- 
stance of gross misery of any kind not directly 
caused by the folly of the sufferer. There are no 



TEE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 5 

pictures of vice or poverty or squalor. There are 
no rags, no gin, no brutal passions. That average 
humanity which she favours is very borne in in- 
tellect, but very genial in heart, as a glance at 
its representatives in her pages will convince us. 
In Adam Bede, there is Mr. Irwine, the vicar, 
with avowedly no qualification for his profession, 
placidly playing chess with his mother, stroking his 
dogs, and dipping into Greek tragedies; there is 
the excellent Martin Poyser at the Farm, good- 
natured and rubicund ; there is his wife, somewhat 
too sharply voluble, but only in behalf of cleanli- 
ness and honesty and order ; there is Captain Don- 
nithorne at the Hall, who does a poor girl a mortal 
wrong, but who is, after all, such a nice, good- 
looking fellow ; there are Adam and Seth Bede, the 
carpenter's sons, the strongest, purest, most dis- 
creet of young rustics. The same broad felicity 
prevails in The Mill on the Floss. Mr. Tulliver, 
indeed, fails in business ; but his failure only serves 
as an offset to the general integrity and pros- 
perity. His son is obstinate and wilful; but it is 
all on the side of virtue. His daughter is some- 
what sentimental and erratic ; but she is more con- 
scientious yet. 

Conscience, in the classes from which George 
Eliot recruits her figures, is a universal gift. De- 
cency and plenty and good-humour follow con- 
tentedly in its train. The word which sums up 



6 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

the common traits of our author's various groups 
is the word respectable. Adam Bede is pre-emi- 
nently a respectable young man ; so is Arthur Don- 
nithorne ; so, although he will persist in going with- 
out a cravat, is Felix Holt. So, with perhaps the 
exception of Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest, 
is every important character to be found in our 
author's writings. They all share this fundamen- 
tal trait, — that in each of them passion proves 
itself feebler than conscience. 

The first work which made the name of George 
Eliot generally known, contains, to my perception, 
only a small number of the germs of her future 
power. From the Scenes of Clerical Life to Adam 
Bede she made not so much a step as a leap. Of 
the three tales contained in the former work, I 
think the first is much the best. It is short, 
broadly descriptive, humourous, and exceedingly 
pathetic. "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend 
Amos Barton' ' are fortunes which clever story- 
tellers with a turn for pathos, from Oliver Gold- 
smith downward, have found of very good account, 
— the fortunes of a hapless clergyman of the 
Church of England in daily contention with the 
problem how upon eighty pounds a year to support 
a wife and six children in all due ecclesiastical gen- 
tility. 

"Mr. GilfiTs Love-Story," the second of the 
tales in question, I cannot hesitate to pronounce 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 7 

a failure. George Eliot's pictures of drawing- 
room life are only interesting when they are linked 
or related to scenes in the tavern parlour, the dairy, 
and the cottage. Mr. Gilfil's love-story is enacted 
entirely in the drawing-room, and in consequence 
it is singularly deficient in force and reality. Not 
that it is vulgar, — for our author 's good taste never 
forsakes her, — but it is thin, flat, and trivial. But 
for a certain family likeness in the use of lan- 
guage and the rhythm of the style, it would be 
hard to believe that these pages are by the same 
hand as Silas Marner. 

In "Janet's Repentance," the last and longest 
of the three clerical stories, we return to middle 
life, — the life represented by the Dodsons in The 
Mill on the Floss. The subject of this tale might 
almost be qualified by the French epithet scabreux. 
It would be difficult for what is called realism to 
go further than in the adoption of a heroine stained 
with the vice of intemperance. The theme is un- 
pleasant ; the author chose it at her peril. It must 
be added, however, that Janet Dempster has many 
provocations. Married to a brutal drunkard, she 
takes refuge in drink against his ill-usage; and 
the story deals less with her lapse into disgrace than 
with her redemption, through the kind offices of 
the Reverend Edgar Tryan, — by virtue of which, 
indeed, it takes its place in the clerical series. I 
cannot help thinking that the stern and tragical 



8 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

character of the subject has been enfeebled by the 
over-diffuseness of the narrative and the excess of 
local touches. The abundance of the author's rec- 
ollections and observations of village life clogs the 
dramatic movement, over which she has as yet a 
comparatively slight control. In her subsequent 
works the stouter fabric of the story is better able 
to support this heavy drapery of humour and di- 
gression. 

To a certain extent, I think Silas Marner holds 
a higher place than any of the author's works. 
It is more nearly a masterpiece; it has more of 
that simple, rounded, consummate aspect, that 
absence of loose ends and gaping issues, which 
marks a classical work. What was attempted in 
it, indeed, was within more immediate reach than 
the heart-trials of Adam Bede and Maggie Tulliver. 
A poor, dull-witted, disappointed Methodist cloth- 
weaver; a little golden-haired foundling child; a 
well-meaning, irresolute country squire, and his 
patient, childless wife; — these, with a chorus of 
simple, beer-loving villagers, make up the dramatis 
personae. More than any of its brother-works, 
Silas Marner, I think, leaves upon the mind a deep 
impression of the grossly material life of agri- 
cultural England in the last days of the old regime, 
— the days of full-orbed Toryism, of Trafalgar 
and of Waterloo, when the invasive spirit of 



TEE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 9 

French domination threw England back upon a 
sense of her own insular solidity, and made her 
for the time doubly, brutally, morbidly English. 
Perhaps the best pages in the work are the first 
thirty, telling the story of poor Marner's disap- 
pointments in friendship and in love, his unmerited 
disgrace, and his long, lonely twilight-life at Rave- 
loe, with the sole companionship of his loom, in 
which his muscles moved "with such even repeti- 
tion, that their pause seemed almost as much a 
constraint as the holding of his breath.' ' 

Here, as in all George Eliot's books, there is 
a middle life and a low life; and here, as usual, 
I prefer the low life. In Silas Marner, in my opin- 
ion, she has come nearest the mildly rich tints of 
brown and gray, the mellow lights and the un- 
dreadful corner-shadows of the Dutch masters 
whom she emulates. One of the chapters contains 
a scene in a pot-house, which frequent reference 
has made famous. Never was a group of honest, 
garrulous village simpletons more kindly and hu- 
manely handled. After a long and somewhat 
chilling silence, amid the pipes and beer, the land- 
lord opens the conversation "by saying in a doubt- 
ful tone to his cousin the butcher: — 

" 'Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you 
druv in yesterday, Bob?' 

"The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man, 



10 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

was not disposed to answer rashly. He gave a 
few puffs before he spat, and replied, 'And they 
wouldn't be fur wrong, John/ 

''After this feeble, delusive thaw, silence set in 
as severely as before. 

" 'Was it a red Durham ?' said the farrier, tak- 
ing up the thread of discourse after the lapse of 
a few minutes. 

"The farrier looked at the landlord, and the 
landlord looked at the butcher, as the person who 
must take the responsibility of answering. 

" 'Bed it was/ said the butcher, in his good- 
humoured husky treble, — 'and a Durham it was.' 

" 'Then you needn't tell me who you bought it 
of/ said the farrier, looking round with some 
triumph; 'I know who it is has got the red Dur- 
hams o' this country-side. And she'd a white star 
on her brow, I '11 bet a penny ? ' 

"'Well; yes — she might,' said the butcher, 
slowly, considering that he was giving a decided 
affirmation. 'I don't say contrairy.' 

" ' I knew that very well, ' said the farrier, throw- 
ing himself back defiantly; 'if I don't know Mr. 
Lammeter's cows, I should like to know who does, 
— that's all. And as for the cow you bought, bar- 
gain or no bargain, I've been at the drenching of 
her, — contradick me who will.' 

"The farrier looked fierce, and the mild 
butcher's conversational spirit was roused a little. 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 11 

" 'I'm not for contradicking no man,' he said; 
'I'm for peace and quietness. Some are for cut- 
ting long ribs. I'm for cutting 'em short myself; 
but / don't quarrel with 'em. All I say is, it's a 
lovely carkiss, — and anybody as was reasonable, 
it'ud bring tears into their eyes to look at it.' 

" 'Well, it's the cow as I drenched, whatever it 
is,' pursued the farrier, angrily; 'and it was Mr. 
Lammeter's cow, else you told a lie when you said 
it was a red Durham.' 

" 'I tell no Hes,' said the butcher, with the same 
mild huskiness as before; 'and I contradick none, 
— not if a man was to swear himself black; he's 
no meat of mine, nor none of my bargains. All I 
say is, it's a lovely carkiss. And what I say I'll 
stick to; but I'll quarrel wi' no man.' 

" 'No,' said the farrier, with bitter sarcasm, 
looking at the company generally; 'and p'rhaps 
you didn't say the cow was a red Durham; and 
p'rhaps you didn't say she'd got a star on her 
brow, — stick to that, now you are at it.' ' 

Matters having come to this point, the landlord 
interferes ex officio to preserve order. The Lam- 
meter family having come up, he discreetly invites 
Mr. Macey, the parish clerk and tailor, to favour 
the company with his recollections on the subject. 
Mr. Macey, however, "smiled pityingly in answer 
to the landlord's appeal, and said: 'Ay, ay; I 
know, I know: but I let other folks talk. I've laid 



12 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

by now, and gev up to the young uns. Ask them 
as have been to school at Tarley: they've learn 't 
pernouncing ; that 's came up since my day. ' ' ' 

Mr. Macey is nevertheless persuaded to dribble 
out his narrative; proceeding by instalments, and 
questioned from point to point, in a kind of So- 
cratic manner, by the landlord. He at last arrives 
at Mr. Lammeter's marriage, and how the clergy- 
man, when he came to put the questions, inad- 
vertently transposed the position of the two essen- 
tial names, and asked, "Wilt thou have this man 
to be thy wedded wife?" etc. 

" 'But the partic'larest thing of all/ pursues 
Mr. Macey, 'is, as nobody took any notice on it 
but me, and they answered straight off "Yes," 
like as if it had been me saying "Amen" i' the 
right place, without listening to what went be- * 
fore. ' 

" 'But you knew what was going on well enough, 
didn't you, Mr. Macey? You were live enough, 
eh?' said the butcher. 

" 'Yes, bless you!' said Mr. Macey, pausing, 
and smiling in pity at the impatience of his, 
hearer's imagination, — 'why, I was all of a trem- 
ble; it was as if I'd been a coat pulled by two 
tails, like ; for I couldn't stop the parson, I couldn't 
take upon me to do that; and yet I said to my- 
self, I says, "Suppose they shouldn't be fast mar- 
ried, ' ' 'cause the words are contrairy, and my head 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 13 

went working like a mill, for I was always uncom- 
mon for turning things over and seeing all round 
'em; and I says to myself, "Is't the meaning or 
the words as makes folks fast i' wedlock?" For 
the parson meant right, and the bride and bride- 
groom meant right. But then, when I came to 
think on it, meaning goes but a little way i' most 
things, for you may mean to stick things together 
and your glue may be bad, and then where are 
you?' " 

Mr. Macey's doubts, however, are set at rest by 
the parson after the service, who assures him that 
what does the business is neither the meaning nor 
the words, but the register. Mr. Macey then ar- 
rives at the chapter — or rather is gently inducted 
thereunto by his hearers — of the ghosts who fre- 
quent certain of the Lammeter stables. But 
ghosts threatening to prove as pregnant a theme 
of contention as Durham cows, the landlord again 
meditates: " * There's folks i' my opinion, they 
can't see ghos'es, not if they stood as plain as 
a pikestaff before 'em. And there's reason i' that. 
For there's my wife, now, can't smell, not if 
she'd the strongest o' cheese under her nose. I 
never seed a ghost myself, but then I says to my- 
self, "Very like I haven't the smell for 'em." I 
mean, putting a ghost for a smell or else contrairi- 
ways. And so I'm for holding with both sides. 
. . . For the smell's what I go by. 9 " 



14 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

The best drawn of the village worthies in Silas 
Marner are Mr. Macey, of the scene just quoted, 
and good Dolly Winthrop, Marner 's kindly pa- 
troness. I have room for only one more specimen 
of Mr. Macey. He is looking on at a New Year's 
dance at Squire Cass's, beside Ben Winthrop, 
Dolly's husband. 

" 'The Squire's pretty springy, considering his 
weight,' said Mr. Macey, 'and he stamps uncom- 
mon well. But Mr. Lammeter beats 'em all for 
shapes; you see he holds his head like a sodger, 
and he isn't so cushiony as most o' the oldish 
gentlefolks, — they run fat in gineral; — and he's 
got a fine leg. The parson's nimble enough, but 
he hasn't got much of a leg: it is a bit too thick 
downward, and his knees might be a bit nearer 
without damage; but he might do worse, he might 
do worse. Though he hasn't that grand way o' 
waving his hand as the Squire has.' 

" 'Talk o' nimbleness, look at Mrs. Osgood,' said 
Ben Winthrop. . . . 'She's the finest made 
woman as is, let the next be where she will.' 

" 'I don't heed how the women are made,' said 
Mr. Macey, with some contempt. ' They wear nay- 
ther coat nor breeches ; you can 't make much out o ' 
their shapes V " 

Mrs. Winthrop, the wheelwright's wife who, out 
of the fullness of her charity, comes to comfort 
Silas in the season of his distress, is in her way one 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 15 

of the most truthfully sketched of the author's 
figures. "She was in all respects a woman of 
scrupulous conscience, so eager for duties that life 
seemed to offer them too scantily unless she rose 
at half past four, though this threw a scarcity of 
work over the more advanced hours of the morn- 
ing, which it was a constant problem for her to 
remove. . . . She was a very mild, patient 
woman, whose nature it was to seek out all the 
sadder and more serious elements of life and pas- 
ture her mind upon them." She stamps I. H. S. 
on her cakes and loaves without knowing what the 
letters mean, or indeed without knowing that they 
are letters, being very much surprised that Mar- 
ner can "read 'em off," — chiefly because they are 
on the pulpit cloth at church. She touches upon 
religious themes in a manner to make the super- 
ficial reader apprehend that she cultivates some 
polytheistic form of faith, — extremes meet. She 
urges Marner to go to church, and describes the 
satisfaction which she herself derives from the per- 
formance of her religious duties. 

"If you've niver had no church, there 's no 
telling what good it'll do you. For I feel as set 
up and comfortable as niver was, when I've been 
and heard the prayers and the singing to the praise 
and glory o' God, as Mr. Macey gives out, — and 
Mr. Crackenthorp saying good words and more 
partic'lar on Sacramen' day ; and if a bit o' trouble 



16 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

comes, I feel as I can put up wi' it, for I've looked 
for help i' the right quarter, and giv myself up 
to Them as we must all give ourselves up to at 
the last: and if we've done our part, it isn't to be 
believed as Them as are above us 'ud be worse nor 
we are, and come short o' Theirn." 

1 'The plural pronoun," says the author, "was 
no heresy of Dolly's, but only her way of avoiding 
a presumptuous familiarity. ' ' I imagine that there 
is in no other English novel a figure so simple in 
its elements as this of Dolly Winthrop, which is 
so real without being contemptible, and so quaint 
without being ridiculous. 

In all those of our author's books which have 
borne the name of the hero or heroine, — Adam 
Bede, Silas Marner, Romola, and Felix Holt, — the 
person so put forward has really played a subor- 
dinate part. The author may have set out with 
the intention of maintaining him supreme; but 
her material has become rebellious in her hands, 
and the technical hero has been eclipsed by the 
real one. Tito is the leading figure in Romola. 
The story deals predominantly, not with Romola 
as affected by Tito's faults, but with Tito's faults 
as affecting first himself, and incidentally his wife. 
Godfrey Cass, with his lifelong secret, is by right 
the hero of Silas Marner. Felix Holt, in the work 
which bears his name, is little more than an oc- 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 17 

casional apparition; and indeed the novel has no 
hero, but only a heroine. 

The same remark applies to Adam Bede, as the 
work stands. The central figure of the book, by 
virtue of her great misfortune, is Hetty Sorrel. 
In the presence of that misfortune no one else, 
assuredly, has a right to claim dramatic pre-emi- 
nence. The one person for whom an approach to 
equality may be claimed is, not Adam Bede, but 
Arthur Donnithorne. If the story had ended, as 
I should have infinitely preferred to see it end, 
with Hetty's execution, or even with her reprieve, 
and if Adam had been left to his grief, and Dinah 
Morris to the enjoyment of that distinguished celi- 
bacy for which she was so well suited, then I 
think Adam might have shared the honours of pre- 
eminence with his hapless sweetheart. But as it 
is, the continuance of the book in his interest is 
fatal to him. His sorrow at Hetty's misfortune 
is not a sufficient sorrow for the situation. That 
his marriage at some future time was quite pos- 
sible, and even natural, I readily admit; but that 
was matter for a new story. 

This point illustrates, I think, the great advan- 
tage of the much-censured method, introduced by 
Balzac, of continuing his heroes' adventures from 
tale to tale. Or, admitting that the author was in- 
disposed to undertake, or even to conceive, in its 



18 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

completeness, a new tale, in which Adam, healed 
of his wound by time, should address himself to 
another woman, I yet hold that it would be possi- 
ble tacitly to foreshadow some such event at the 
close of the tale which we are supposing to end 
with Hetty's death, — to make it the logical conse- 
quence of Adam's final state of mind. Of course 
circumstances would have much to do with bring- 
ing it to pass, and these circumstances could not 
be foreshadowed; but apart from the action of 
circumstances would stand the fact that, to begin 
with, the event was possible. 

The assurance of this possibility is what I should 
have desired the author to place the sympathetic 
reader at a stand-point to deduce for himself. In 
every novel the work is divided between the writer 
and the reader; but the writer makes the reader 
very much as he makes his characters. When he 
makes him ill, that is, makes him different, he 
does no work ; the writer does all. When he makes 
him well, that is, makes him interested, then the 
reader does quite half the labour. In making such 
a deduction as I have just indicated, the reader 
would be doing but his share of the task ; the grand 
point is to get him to make it. I hold that there 
is a way. It is perhaps a secret; but until it is 
found out, I think that the art of story-telling 
cannot be said to have approached perfection. 

When you re-read coldly and critically a book 



TEE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 19 

which in former years you have read warmly and 
carelessly, you are surprised to see how it changes 
its proportions. It falls away in those parts which 
have been pre-eminent in your memory, and it in- 
creases in the small portions. Until I lately read 
Adam Bede for a second time, Mrs. Poyser was 
in my mind its representative figure ; for I remem- 
bered a number of her epigrammatic sallies. But 
now, after a second reading, Mrs. Poyser is the 
last figure I think of, and a fresh perusal of her 
witticisms has considerably diminished their clas- 
sical flavour. And if I must tell the truth, Adam 
himself is next to the last, and sweet Dinah Morris 
third from the last. The person immediately 
evoked by the title of the work is poor Hetty 
Sorrel. 

Mrs. Poyser is too epigrammatic; her wisdom 
smells of the lamp. I do not mean to say that 
she is not natural, and that women of her class 
are not often gifted with her homely fluency, her 
penetration, and her turn for forcible analogies. 
But she is too sustained ; her morality is too shrill, 
— too much in staccato; she too seldom subsides 
into the commonplace. Yet it cannot be denied 
that she puts things very happily. Kemonstrating 
with Dinah Morris on the undue disinterestedness 
of her religious notions, "But for the matter o' 
that,'' she cries, "if everybody was to do like you, 
the world must come to a stand-still ; for if every- 



20 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

body tried to do without house and home and eat- 
ing and drinking, and was always talking as we 
must despise the things o' the world, as you say, 
I should like to know where the pick of the stock, 
and the corn, and the best new milk-cheeses 'ud 
have to go? Everybody 'ud be wanting to make 
bread o' tail ends, and everybody 'ud be running 
after everybody else to preach to 'em, i 'stead o' 
bringing up their families and laying by against 
a bad harvest. ' ' And when Hetty comes home late 
from the Chase, and alleges in excuse that the 
clock at home is so much earlier than the clock 
at the great house: "What, you'd be wanting the 
clock set by gentlefolks' time, would you? an' sit 
up burning candle, and lie a-bed wi' the sun 
a-bakin' you, like a cowcumber i' the frame?'' 
Mrs. Poyser has something almost of Yankee 
shrewdness and angularity; but the figure of a 
New England rural housewife would lack a whole 
range of Mrs. Poyser 's feelings, which, whatever 
may be its effect in real life, gives its subject in 
a novel at least a very picturesque richness of 
colour; the constant sense, namely, of a superin- 
cumbent layer of "gentlefolks," whom she and her 
companions can never raise their heads unduly 
without hitting. 

My chief complaint with Adam Bede himself 
is that he is too good. He is meant, I conceive, 
to be every inch a man; but, to my mind, there 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 21 

are several inches wanting. He lacks spontaneity 
and sensibility, he is too stiff-backed. He lacks 
that supreme quality without which a man can 
never be interesting to men, — the capacity to be 
tempted. His nature is without richness or re- 
sponsiveness. I doubt not that such men as he 
exist, especially in the author's thrice-English 
Loamshire; she has partially described them as 
a class, with a felicity which carries conviction. 
She claims for her hero that, although a plain 
man, he was as little an ordinary man as he was 
a genius. 

"He was not an average man. Yet such men 
as he are reared here and there in every generation 
of our peasant artisans, with an inheritance of af- 
fections nurtured by a simple family life of com- 
mon need and common industry, and an inherit- 
ance of faculties trained in skillful, courageous 
labour; they make their way upward, rarely as 
geniuses, most commonly as painstaking, honest 
men, with the skill and conscience to do well the 
tasks that lie before them. Their lives have no 
discernible echo beyond the neighbourhood where 
they dwelt; but you are almost sure to find there 
some good piece of road, some building, some ap- 
plication of mineral produce, some improvement 
in farming practice, some reform of parish abuses, 
with which their names are associated by one or 
two generations after them. Their employers were 



22 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

the richer for them; the work of their hands has 
worn well, and the work of their brains has guided 
well the hands of other men." 

One cannot help feeling thankful to the kindly- 
writer who attempts to perpetuate their memories 
beyond the generations which profit immediately 
by their toil. If she is not a great dramatist, 
she is at least an exquisite describer. But one 
can as little help feeling that it is no more than a 
strictly logical retribution, that in her hour of 
need (dramatically speaking) she should find them 
indifferent to their duties as heroes. I profoundly 
doubt whether the central object of a novel may 
successfully be a passionless creature. The ulti- 
mate eclipse, both of Adam Bede and of Felix Holt 
would seem to justify my question. Tom Tulliver 
is passionless, and Tom Tulliver lives gratefully in 
the memory; but this, I take it, is because he is 
strictly a subordinate figure, and awakens no re- 
action of feeling on the reader's part by usurping 
a position which he is not the man to fill. 

Dinah Morris is apparently a study from life; 
and it is warm praise to say, that, in spite of the 
high key in which she is conceived, morally, she 
retains many of the warm colours of life. But 
I confess that it is hard to conceive of a woman 
so exalted by religious fervour remaining so cool- 
headed and so temperate. There is in Dinah Mor- 
ris too close an agreement between her distin- 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 23 

guished natural disposition and the action of her 
religious faith. If by nature she had been pas- 
sionate, rebellious, selfish, I could better under- 
stand her actual self-abnegation. I would look 
upon it as the logical fruit of a profound religious 
experience. But as she stands, heart and soul go 
easily hand in hand. I believe it to be very un- 
common for what is called a religious conversion 
merely to intensify and consecrate pre-existing in- 
clinations. It is usually a change, a wrench; and 
the new life is apt to be the more sincere as the 
old one had less in common with it. But, as I 
have said, Dinah Morris bears so many indications 
of being a reflection of facts well known to the 
author, — and the phenomena of Methodism, from 
the frequency with which their existence is referred 
to in her pages, appear to be so familiar to her, 
— that I hesitate to do anything but thankfully 
accept her portrait. 

About Hetty Sorrel I shall have no hesitation 
whatever: I accept her with all my heart. Of all 
George Eliot's female figures she is the least ambi- 
tious, and on the whole, I think, the most success- 
ful. The part of the story which concerns her is 
much the most forcible ; and there is something in- 
finitely tragic in the reader's sense of the contrast 
between the sternly prosaic life of the good people 
about her, their wholesome decency and their noon- 
day probity, and the dusky sylvan path along which 



24 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

poor Hetty is tripping, light-footed, to her ruin. 
Hetty's conduct throughout seems to me to be 
thoroughly consistent. The author has escaped the 
easy error of representing her as in any degree 
made serious by suffering. She is vain and super- 
ficial by nature; and she remains so to the end. 

As for Arthur Donnithorne, I would rather have 
had him either better or worse. I would rather 
have had a little more premeditation before his 
fault, or a little more repentance after it; that is, 
while repentance could still be of use. Not that, 
all things considered, he is not a very fair image 
of a frank-hearted, well-meaning, careless, self-in- 
dulgent young gentleman; but the author has in 
his case committed the error which in Hetty's she 
avoided, — the error of showing him as redeemed by 
suffering. I cannot but think that he was as weak 
as she. A weak woman, indeed, is weaker than a 
weak man; but Arthur Donnithorne was a super- 
ficial fellow, a person emphatically not to be moved 
by a shock of conscience into a really interesting 
and dignified attitude, such as he is made to as- 
sume at the close of the book. Why not see things 
in their nakedness ? the impatient reader is tempted 
to ask. Why not let passions and foibles play 
themselves out? 

It is as a picture, or rather as a series of pic- 
tures, that I find Adam Bede most valuable. The 
author succeeds better in drawing attitudes of feel- 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 25 

ing than in drawing movements of feeling. In- 
deed, the only attempt at development of character 
or of purpose in the book occurs in the case of 
Arthur Donnithorne, where the materials are of 
the simplest kind. Hetty's lapse into disgrace is 
not gradual, it is immediate : it is without struggle 
and without passion. Adam himself has arrived 
at perfect righteousness when the book opens ; and 
it is impossible to go beyond that. In his case too, 
therefore, there is no dramatic progression. The 
same remark applies to Dinah Morris. 

It is not in her conceptions nor her composition 
that George Eliot is strongest : it is in her touches. 
In these she is quite original. She is a good deal 
of a humourist, and something of a satirist ; but she 
is neither Dickens nor Thackeray. She has over 
them the great advantage that she is also a good 
deal of a philosopher; and it is to this union of 
the keenest observation with the ripest reflection, 
that her style owes its essential force. She is a 
thinker, — not, perhaps, a passionate thinker, but 
at least a serious one; and the term can be ap- 
plied with either adjective neither to Dickens nor 
Thackeray. The constant play of lively and vig- 
ourous thought about the objects furnished by her 
observation animates these latter with a surprising 
richness of colour and a truly human interest. It 
gives to the author's style, moreover, that lin- 
gering, affectionate, comprehensive quality which 



26 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

is its chief distinction ; and perhaps occasionally it 
makes her tedious. George Eliot is so little tedious, 
however, because, if, on the one hand, her reflection 
never flags, so, on the other, her observation never 
ceases to supply it with material. Her observation, 
I think, is decidedly of the feminine kind : it deals, 
in preference, with small things. This fact may 
be held to explain the excellence of what I have 
called her pictures, and the comparative feebleness 
of her dramatic movement. 

The contrast here indicated, strong in Adam 
Bede, is most striking in Felix Holt, the Radical. 
The latter work is an admirable tissue of details; 
but it seems to me quite without character as a 
composition. It leaves upon the mind no single 
impression. Felix Holt's radicalism, the pre- 
tended motive of the story, is utterly choked 
amidst a mass of subordinate interests. No rep- 
resentation is attempted of the growth of his opin- 
ions, or of their action upon his character; he is 
marked by the same singular rigidity of outline 
and fixedness of posture which characterized Adam 
Bede, — except, perhaps, that there is a certain in- 
clination towards poetry in Holt's attitude. But 
if the general outline is timid and undecided in 
Felix Holt, the different parts are even richer than 
in former works. There is no person in the book 
who attains to triumphant vitality; but there is 
not a single figure, of however little importance, 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 27 

that has not caught from without a certain reflec- 
tion of life. There is a little old waiting-woman 
to a great lady, — Mrs. Denner by name, — who does 
not occupy five pages in the story, but who leaves 
upon the mind a most vivid impression of decent, 
contented, intelligent, half-stoical servility. 

" There were different orders of beings, — so ran 
Denner's creed, — and she belonged to another 
order than that to which her mistress belonged. 
She had a mind as sharp as a needle, and would 
have seen through and through the ridiculous pre- 
tensions of a born servant who did not submis- 
sively accept the rigid fate which had given her 
born superiors. She would have called such pre- 
tensions the wrigglings of a worm that tried to 
walk on its tail. . . . She was a hard-headed, 
godless little woman, but with a character to be 
reckoned on as you reckon on the qualities of 
iron." 

"I'm afraid of ever expecting anything good 
again," her mistress says to her in a moment of 
depression. 

" 'That's weakness, madam. Things don't hap- 
pen because they are bad or good, else all eggs 
would be addled or none at all, and at the most it 
is but six to the dozen. There's good chances and 
bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by 
one string. . . . There's a good deal of pleas- 
ure in life for you yet.' 



28 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 



Hi 



Nonsense! There's no pleasure for old 
women. . . . What are your pleasures, Den- 
ner, besides being a slave to mef 

"0, there's pleasure in knowing one is not a 
fool, like half the people one sees about. And 
managing one's husband is some pleasure, and 
doing one's business well. Why, if I've only got 
some orange-flowers to candy, I shouldn't like to 
die till I see them all right. Then there 's the sun- 
shine now and then; I like that, as the cats do. 
I look upon it life is like our game at whist, when 
Banks and his wife come to the still-room of an 
evening. I don't enjoy the game much, but I like 
to play my cards well, and see what will be the 
end of it; and I want to see you make the best of 
your hand, madam, for your luck has been mine 
these forty years now. ' ' 

And, on another occasion, when her mistress ex- 
claims, in a fit of distress, that "God was cruel 
when he made women," the author says: — 

"The waiting-woman had none of that awe 
which could be turned into defiance; the sacred 
grove was a common thicket to her. 

" 'It mayn't be good luck to be a woman/ she 
said. 'But one begins with it from a baby; one 
gets used to it. And I shouldn't like to be a 
man, — to cough so loud, and stand straddling about 
on a wet day, and be so wasteful with meat and 
drink. They're a coarse lot, I think.' " 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 29 

I should think they were, beside Mrs. Denner. 

This glimpse of her is made up of what I 
have called the author's toadies. She excels in 
the portrayal of homely stationary figures for 
which her well-stored memory furnishes her with 
types. Here is another touch, in which satire pre- 
dominates. Harold Transome makes a speech to 
the electors at Treby. 

" Harold's only interruption came from his own 
party. The oratorical clerk at the Factory, acting 
as the tribune of the dissenting interest, and feel- 
ing bound to put questions, might have been 
troublesome; but his voice being unpleasantly 
sharp, while Harold's was full and penetrating, 
the questioning was cried down." 

Of the four English stories, The Mill on the 
Floss seems to me to have most dramatic continuity, 
in distinction from that descriptive, discursive 
method of narration which I have attempted to 
indicate. After Hetty Sorrel, I think Maggie Tul- 
liver the most successful of the author's young 
women, and after Tito Melema, Tom Tulliver the 
best of her young men. English novels abound in 
pictures of childhood; but I know of none more 
truthful and touching than the early pages of this 
work. Poor erratic Maggie is worth a hundred 
of her positive brother, and yet on the very 
threshold of life she is compelled to accept him 
as her master. He falls naturally into the man's 



30 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

privilege of always being in the right. The fol- 
lowing scene is more than a reminiscence; it is 
a real retrospect. Tom and Maggie are sitting 
upon the bough of an elder-tree, eating jam-puffs. 
At last only one remains, and Tom undertakes to 
divide it. 

''The knife descended on the puff, and it was 
in two; but the result was not satisfactory to 
Tom, for he still eyed the halves doubtfully. At 
last he said, 'Shut your eyes, Maggie/ 

"'What for?' 

" 'You never mind what for, — shut 'em when I 
tell you.' 

"Maggie obeyed. 

" 'Now, which '11 you have, Maggie, right hand 
or left?' 

" 'I'll have that one with the jam run out,' said 
Maggie, keeping her eyes shut to please Tom. 

" 'Why, you don't like that, you silly. You 
may have it if it comes to you fair, but I sha'n't 
give it to you without. Right or left, — you choose 
now. Ha-a-a!' said Tom, in a tone of exaspera- 
tion, as Maggie peeped. 'You keep your eyes 
shut now, else you sha'n't have any.' 

"Maggie's power of sacrifice did not extend so 
far; indeed, I fear she cared less that Tom should 
enjoy the utmost possible amount of puff, than that 
he should be pleased with her for giving him the 
best bit. So she shut her eyes quite close until 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 31 

Tom told her to 'say which/ and then she said, 
'Left hand/ 

" 'You've got it/ said Tom, in rather a bitter 
tone. 

" 'What! the bit with the jam run out?' 

" 'No; here, take it/ said Tom, firmly, handing 
decidedly the best piece to Maggie. 

" '0, please, Tom, have it; I don't mind, — I 
like the other; please take this.' 

" 'No, I sha'n't/ said Tom, almost crossly, be- 
ginning on his own inferior piece. 

"Maggie, thinking it was of no use to contend 
further, began too, and ate up her half puff with 
considerable relish as well as rapidity. But Tom 
had finished first, and had to look on while Maggie 
ate her last morsel or two, feeling in himself a 
capacity for more. Maggie didn't know Tom was 
looking at her: she was see-sawimg on the elder- 
hough, lost to everything but a vague sense of jam 
and idleness. 

" 'O, you greedy thing!' said Tom, when she 
had swallowed the last morsel." 

The portions of the story which bear upon the 
Dodson family are in their way not unworthy of 
Balzac; only that, while our author has treated 
its peculiarities humourously, Balzac would have 
treated them seriously, almost solemnly. We are 
reminded of him by the attempt to classify the 
Dodsons socially in a scientific manner, and to 



32 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

accumulate small examples of their idiosyncrasies. 
I do not mean to say that the resemblance is very 
deep. 

The chief defect — indeed, the only serious one 
— in The Mill on the Floss is its conclusion. Such 
a conclusion is in itself assuredly not illegitimate, 
and there is nothing in the fact of the flood, to my 
knowledge, essentially unnatural: what I object to 
is its relation to the preceding part of the story. 
The story is told as if it were destined to have, if 
not a strictly happy termination, at least one within 
ordinary probabilities. As it stands, the denoue- 
ment shocks the reader most painfully. Nothing 
has prepared him for it; the story does not move 
towards it; it casts no shadow before it. Did 
such a denouement lie within the author's inten- 
tions from the first, or was it a tardy expedient 
for the solution of Maggie's difficulties? This 
question the reader asks himself, but of course he 
asks it in vain. 

For my part, although, as long as humanity is 
subject to floods and earthquakes, I have no objec- 
tion to see them made use of in novels, I would 
in this particular case have infinitely preferred 
that Maggie should have been left to her own de- 
vices. I understand the author's scruples, and 
to a certain degree I respect them. A lonely spin- 
sterhood seemed but a dismal consummation of 
her generous life ; and yet, as the author conceives, 



TEE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 33 

it was unlikely that she would return to Stephen 
Guest. I respect Maggie profoundly; but never- 
theless I ask, Was this after all so unlikely? I 
will not try to answer the question. I have shown 
enough courage in asking it. But one thing is 
certain: a denouement by which Maggie should 
have called Stephen back would have been ex- 
tremely interesting, and would have had far more 
in its favour than can be put to confusion by a 
mere exclamation of horror. 

I have come to the end of my space without 
speaking of Romola, which, as the most important 
of George Eliot's works, I had kept in reserve. I 
have only room to say that on the whole I think 
it is decidedly the most important, — not the most 
entertaining nor the most readable, but the one in 
which the largest things are attempted and 
grasped. The figure of Savonarola, subordinate 
though it is, is a figure on a larger scale than 
any which George Eliot has elsewhere undertaken ; 
and in the career of Tito Melema there is a fuller 
representation of the development of a character. 

Considerable as are our author's qualities as an 
artist, and largely as they are displayed in 
" Romola," the book strikes me less as a work of 
art than as a work of morals. Like all of George 
Eliot's works, its dramatic construction is feeble; 
the story drags and halts, — the setting is too large 
for the picture; but I remember that, the first 



34 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

time I read it, I declared to myself that much 
should be forgiven it for the sake of its generous 
feeling and its elevated morality. I still recognize 
this latter fact, but I think I find it more on a 
level than I at first found it with the artistic 
conditions of the book. 

"Our deeds determine us," George Eliot says 
somewhere in Adam Bede, "as much as we deter- 
mine our deeds. ' ' This is the moral lesson of Bom- 
ola. A man has no associate so intimate as his own 
character, his own career, — his present and his past ; 
and if he builds up his career of timid and base 
actions, they cling to him like evil companions, 
to sophisticate, to corrupt, and to damn him. As 
in Maggie Tulliver we had a picture of the eleva- 
tion of the moral tone by honesty and generosity, 
so that when the mind found itself face to face 
with the need for a strong muscular effort, it was 
competent to perform it ; so in Tito we have a pic- 
ture of that depression of the moral tone by falsity 
and self-indulgence, which gradually evokes on 
every side of the subject some implacable claim, 
to be avoided or propitiated. At last all his* un- 
paid debts join issue before him, and he finds the 
path of life a hideous blind alley. 

Can any argument be more plain? Can any 
lesson be more salutary? "Under every guilty 
secret," writes the author, with her usual felicity, 
"there is a hidden brood of guilty wishes, whose 



THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 35 

unwholesome, infecting life is cherished by the 
darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often 
lies less in the commission than in the consequent 
adjustment of our desires, — the enlistment of self- 
interest on the side of falsity ; as, on the other hand, 
the purifying influence of public confession springs 
from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever 
swept away, and the soul recovers the noble atti- 
tude of simplicity." And again: ''Tito was ex- 
periencing that inexorable law of human souls, that 
we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the re- 
iterated choice of good or evil that gradually de- 
termines character." Somewhere else I think she 
says, in purport, that our deeds are like our chil- 
dren; we beget them, and rear them and cherish 
them, and they grow up and turn against us and 
misuse us. 

The fact that has led me to a belief in the fun- 
damental equality between the worth of Bomola 
as a moral argument and its value as a work of 
art, is the fact that in each character it seems 
to me essentially prosaic. The excellence both of 
the spirit and of the execution of the book is em- 
phatically an obvious excellence. They make no 
demand upon the imagination of the reader. It 
is true of both of them that he who runs may read 
them. It may excite surprise that I should inti- 
mate that George Eliot is deficient in imagination ; 
but I believe that I am right in so doing. Very 



36 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

readable novels have been written without imagina- 
tion; and as compared with writers who, like Mr. 
Trollope, are totally destitute of the faculty, 
George Eliot may be said to be richly endowed 
with it. But as compared with writers whom we 
are tempted to call decidedly imaginative, she 
must, in my opinion, content herself with the very 
solid distinction of being exclusively an observer. 
In confirmation of this I would suggest a compari- 
son of those chapters in Adam Bede which treat 
of Hetty's flight and wanderings, and those of 
Miss Bronte's Jane Eyre which describe the hero- 
ine 's escape from Rochester 's house and subsequent 
perambulations. The former are throughout ad- 
mirable prose; the latter are in portions very good 
poetry. 

One word more. Of all the impressions — and 
they are numerous — which a reperusal of George 
Eliot's writings has given me, I find the strongest 
to be this: that (with all deference to Felix Holt, 
the Radical) the author is in morals and aesthetics 
essentially a conservative. In morals her prob- 
lems are still the old, passive problems. I use the 
word "old" with all respect. What moves her 
most is the idea of a conscience harassed by the 
memory of slighted obligations. Unless in the case 
of Savonarola, she has made no attempt to depict 
a conscience taking upon itself great and novel 
responsibilities. In her last work, assuredly such 



TEE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT 37 

an attempt was — considering the title — conspicuous 
by its absence. 

Of a corresponding tendency in the second de- 
partment of her literary character, — or perhaps 
I should say in a certain middle field where morals 
and aesthetics move in concert, — it is very difficult 
to give an example. A tolerably good one is fur- 
nished by her inclination to compromise with the 
old tradition — and here I use the word "old" 
without respect — which exacts that a serious story 
of manners shall close with the factitious happi- 
ness of a fairy-tale. I know few things more irri- 
tating in a literary way than each of her final chap- 
ters, — for even in The Mill on the Floss there is a 
fatal "Conclusion." Both as an artist and a 
thinker, in other words, our author is an optimist ; 
and although a conservative is not necessarily an 
optimist, I think an optimist is pretty likely to 
be a conservative. 



ON A DRAMA OF MR. BROWNING 



A. review of The Inn Album, by Robert Browning, 
London, Smith & Elder; Boston, J. R. Osgood & Co. 1875. 
Originally published in The Nation, January 20, 1876. 



ON A DRAMA OF MR. BROWNING 

THIS is a decidedly irritating and displeasing 
performance. It is growing more difficult 
every year for Mr. Browning's old friends to fight 
his battles for him, and many of them will feel that 
on this occasion the cause is really too hopeless, 
and the great poet must himself be answerable for 
his indiscretions. 

Nothing that Mr. Browning writes, of course, 
can be vapid; if this were possible, it would be a 
much simpler affair. If it were a ease of a writer 
" running thin," as the phrase is, there would be 
no need for criticism; there would be nothing in 
the way of matter to criticise, and old readers 
would have no heart to reproach. But it may be 
said of Mr. Browning that he runs thick rather 
than thin, and he need claim none of the tender- 
ness granted to those who have used themselves up 
in the service of their admirers. He is robust and 
vigorous; more so now, even, than heretofore, and 
he is more prolific than in the earlier part of his 
career. But his wantonness, his wilfulness, his 
crudity, his inexplicable want of secondary thought, 
as we may call it, of the stage of reflection that 
41 



42 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

follows upon the first outburst of the idea, and 
smooths, shapes, and adjusts it — all this alloy of 
his great genius is more sensible now than ever. 

The Inn Album reads like a series of rough notes 
for a poem — of hasty hieroglyphics and symbols, 
decipherable only to the author himself. A great 
poem might perhaps have been made of it, but 
assuredly it is not a great poem, nor any poem 
whatsoever. It is hard to say very coherently 
what it is. Up to a certain point, like everything 
of Mr. Browning's, it is highly dramatic and vivid 
and beyond that point, like all its companions, it 
is as little dramatic as possible. It is not narra- 
tive, for there is not a line of comprehensible, •con- 
secutive statement in the two hundred and eleven 
pages of the volume. It is not lyrical, for there is 
not a phrase which in any degree does the office of 
the poetry that comes lawfully into the world — 
chants itself, images itself, or lingers in the mem- 
ory. 

"That bard's a Browning; he neglects the 
form!'' one of the characters exclaims with irre- 
sponsible frankness. That Mr. Browning knows 
he "neglects the form," and does not particularly 
care, does not very much help matters; it only 
deepens the reader's sense of the graceless and 
thankless and altogether unavailable character of 
the poem. And when we say unavailable, we make 
the only reproach which is worth addressing to a 



ON A DRAMA OF MR. BROWNING 43 

writer of Mr. Browning's intellectual power. A 
poem with so many presumptions in its favour as 
such an authorship carries with it is a thing to make 
some intellectual use of, to care for, to remember, 
to return to, to linger over, to become intimate with. 
But we can as little imagine a reader (who has not 
the misfortune to be a reviewer) addressing him- 
self more than once to the perusal of The Inn Al- 
bum, as we fancy cultivating for conversational 
purposes the society of a person afflicted with a 
grievous impediment of speech. 

Two gentlemen have been playing cards all night 
in an inn-parlour, and the peep of day finds one 
of them ten thousand pounds in debt to the other. 
The tables have been turned, and the victim is the 
actual victor. The elder man is a dissolute and 
penniless nobleman, who has undertaken the so- 
cial education of the aspiring young heir of a great 
commercial fortune, and has taught him so well 
that the once ingenuous lad knows more than his 
clever master. The young man has come down 
into the country to see his cousin, who lives, hard 
by at the Hall, with her aunt, and with whom his 
aristocratic preceptor recommends him, for good 
worldly reasons, to make a match. 

Infinite discourse, of that formidable full- 
charged sort that issues from the lips of all Mr. 
Browning's characters, follows the play, and as 
the morning advances the two gentlemen leave the 



44 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

inn and go for a walk. Lord K. has meanwhile 
related to his young companion the history of one 
of his own earlier loves — how he had seduced a 
magnificent young woman, and she had fairly 
frightened him into offering her marriage. On 
learning that he had meant to go free if he could, 
her scorn for him becomes such that she rejects 
his offer of reparation (a very fine stroke) and en- 
ters into wedlock with a "smug, crop-haired, 
smooth-chinned sort of curate-creature. ' ' The 
young man replies that he himself was once in 
love with a person that quite answers to this de- 
scription, and then the companions separate — the 
pupil to call at the Hall, and the preceptor to catch 
the train for London. 

The reader is then carried back to the inn-par- 
lour, into which, on the departure of the gentle- 
men, two ladies have been ushered. One of them 
is the young man's cousin, who is playing at cross- 
purposes with her suitor; the other is her intimate 
friend, arrived on a flying visit. The intimate 
friend is of course the ex-victim of Lord K. The 
ladies have much conversation — all of it rather 
more ingeniously inscrutable than that of their 
predecessors ; it terminates in the exit of the cousin 
and the entrance of the young man. He recog- 
nizes the curate's wife as the object of his own 
stifled affection, and the two have, as the French 
say, an intime conversation. 



ON A DRAMA OF MR. BROWNING 45 

At last Lord K. comes back, having missed his 
train, and finds himself confronted with his 
stormy mistress. Very stormy she proves to be, 
and her outburst of renewed indignation and irony 
contains perhaps the most successful writing in the 
poem. Touched by the lady's eloquence, the 
younger man, who has hitherto professed an almost 
passionate admiration for his companion, begins to 
see him in a less interesting light, and in fact 
promptly turns and reviles him. The situation is 
here extremely dramatic. Lord K. is a cynic of a 
sneaking pattern, but he is at any rate a man of 
ideas. He holds the destiny of his adversaries in 
his hands, and, snatching up the inn album (which 
has been knocking about the table during the fore- 
going portions of the narrative), he scrawls upon 
it his ultimatum. Let the lady now bestow her 
affection on his companion, and let the latter ac- 
cept this boon as a vicarious payment of the gam- 
bling debt, otherwise Lord K. will enlighten the 
lady's husband as to the extent of her acquaintance 
with himself. 

He presents the open page to the heroine, who 
reads it aloud, and for an answer her younger and 
more disinterested lover, "with a tiger-flash yell, 
spring, and scream/ ' throws himself on the in- 
sulter, half an hour since, his guide, philosopher, 
and friend, and, by some means undescribed by 
Mr. Browning puts an end to his life. This inci- 



46 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

dent is related in two pregnant lines, which, 
judged by the general standard of style of the Inn 
Album, must be considered fine: 

"A tiger-flash, yell, spring and scream: halloo! 
Death's out and on him, has and holds him — ugh ! " 

The effect is of course augmented if the reader 
is careful to make the ' ' ugh ! " rhyme correctly 
with the " halloo !" The lady takes poison, which 
she carries on her person and which operates in- 
stantaneously, and the young man's cousin, re-en- 
tering the room, has a sufficiently tremendous sur- 
prise. 

The whole picture indefinably appeals to the 
imagination. There is something very curious 
about it and even rather arbitrary, and the reader 
wonders how it came, in the poet's mind, to take 
exactly that shape. It is very much as if he had 
worked backwards, had seen his denouement first, 
as a mere picture — the two corpses in the inn-par- 
lour, and the young man and his cousin confronted 
above them — and then had traced back the possible 
motives and sources. In looking for these Mr. 
Browning has of course encountered a vast num- 
ber of deep discriminations and powerful touches 
of portraitures. He deals with human character 
as a chemist with his acids and alkalies, and while 
he mixes his coloured fluids in a way that surprises 
the profane, knows perfectly well what he is about. 



ON A DRAMA OF MR. BROWNING 47 

But there is too apt to be in his style that hiss and 
sputter and evil aroma which characterise the pro- 
ceedings of the laboratory. The idea, with Mr. 
Browning, always tumbles out into the world in 
some grotesque hind-foremost manner ; it is like an 
unruly horse backing out of his stall, and stamping 
and plunging as he comes. His thought knows no 
simple stage — at the very moment of its birth it 
is a terribly complicated affair. 

We frankly confess, at the risk of being accused 
of deplorable levity of mind, that we have found 
this want of clearness of explanation, of continuity, 
of at least superficial verisimilitude, of the smooth, 
the easy, the agreeable, quite fatal to our enjoy- 
ment of The Inn Album. It is all too argumenta- 
tive, too curious and recondite. The people talk 
too much in long set speeches, at a moment's no- 
tice, and the anomaly so common in Browning, that 
the talk of the women is even more rugged and in- 
soluble than that of the men, is here greatly exag- 
gerated. We are reading neither prose nor poetry ; 
it is too real for the ideal, and too ideal for the 
real. The author of The Inn Album is not a writer 
to whom we care to pay trivial compliments, and, 
it is not a trivial complaint to say that his book is 
only barely comprehensible. Of a successful dra- 
matic poem one ought to be able to say more. 



SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS 



A review of Essays and Studies, by Algernon Charles 
Swinburne. London: Chatto & Windus, 1875. Originally 
published in The Nation, July 29, 1875. 



SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS 

MR. SWINBURNE has by this time impressed 
upon the general public a tolerably vivid im- 
age of his literary personality. His line is a definite 
one ; his note is familiar, and we know what to ex- 
pect from him. He was at pains, indeed, a year ago 
to quicken the apprehension of American readers by 
an effusion directed more or less explicitly to 
themselves. This piece of literature was brief, but 
it was very remarkable. Mr. Emerson had had oc- 
casion to speak of Mr. Swinburne with qualified ad- 
miration and this circumstance, coming to Mr. 
Swinburne's ears, had prompted him to uncork 
on the spot the vials of his wrath. He addressed 
to a newspaper a letter of which it is but a colour- 
less account to say that it embodied the very hys- 
terics of gross vituperation. 

Mr. Swinburne has some extremely just remarks 
about Byron's unamenableness to quotation, his 
having to be taken in the gross. This is almost 
equally true of our author himself; he must be 
judged by all he has done, and we must allow, in 
our judgment, the weight he would obviously claim 
for it to his elaborate tribute to the genius of Mr. 
51 



52 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

Emerson. His tone has two distinct notes — the 
note of measureless praise and the note of furious 
denunciation. Each is in need of a correction, but 
we confess that, with all its faults, we prefer the 
former. That Mr. Swinburne has a kindness for 
his more restrictive strain is, however, very obvious. 
He is over-ready to sound it, and he is not particu- 
lar about his pretext. 

Some people, he says, for instance, affirm that 
a writer may have a very effective style, yet have 
nothing of value to express with it. Mr. Swin- 
burne demands that they prove their assertion. 
"This flattering unction the very foolishest of ma- 
lignants will hardly, in this case (that of Mr. D. 
G. Rossetti), be able to lay upon the corrosive sore 
which he calls his soul; the ulcer of ill-will must 
rot unrelieved by the rancid ointment of such 
fiction." In Mr. W. M. Rossetti 's edition of Shel- 
ley there is in a certain line, an interpolation of 
the word " autumn." "For the conception of this 
atrocity the editor is not responsible ; for its adop- 
tion he is. A thousand years of purgatorial fire 
would be insufficient expiation for the criminal on 
whose deaf and desperate head must rest the orig- 
inal guilt of defacing the text of Shelley with this 
most damnable corruption." 

The essays before us are upon Victor Hugo, D. 
G. Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold as a 
poet, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and John Ford. 



SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS 53 

To these are added two papers upon pictures — the 
drawings of the old masters at Florence and the 
Royal Academy Exhibition of 1868. Mr. Swin- 
burne, in writing of poets, cannot fail to say a 
great many felicitous things. His own insight into 
the poetic mystery is so deep, his perception in mat- 
ters of language so refined, his power of apprecia- 
tion so large and active, his imagination, especially, 
so sympathetic and flexible, that we constantly feel 
him to be one who has a valid right to judge and 
pass sentence. The variety of his sympathies in 
poetry is especially remarkable, and is in itself a 
pledge of criticism of a liberal kind. Victor Hugo 
is his divinity — a divinity whom indeed, to our 
sense, he effectually conceals and obliterates in the 
suffocating fumes of his rhetoric. On the other 
hand, one of the best papers in the volume is a 
disquisition on the poetry of Mr. Matthew Arnold, 
of which his relish seems hardly less intense and 
for whom he states the case with no less prodigious 
a redundancy of phrase. 

Matthew Arnold's canons of style, we should 
have said, are a positive negation of those of Mr. 
Swinburne's, and it is to the credit of the latter 's 
breadth of taste that he should have entered into 
an intellectual temperament which is so little his 
own. The other articles contain similar examples 
of his vivacity and energy of perception, and offer 
a number of happy judgments and suggestive ob- 



54 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

servations. His estimate of Byron as a poet (not 
in the least as a man — on this point his utterances 
are consummately futile) is singularly discriminat- 
ing; his measurement of Shelley's lyric force is elo- 
quently adequate; his closing words upon John 
Ford are worth quoting as a specimen of strong 
apprehension and solid statement. Mr. Swin- 
burne is by no means always solid, and this pas- 
sage represents him at his best : — 

"No poet is less forgettable than Ford; none 
fastens (as it were) the fangs of his genius and 
his will more deeply in your memory. You can- 
not shake hands with him and pass him by; you 
cannot fall in with him and out again at pleasure ; 
if he touch you once he takes you, and what he 
takes he keeps his hold of ; his work becomes a part 
of your thought and parcel of your spiritual furni- 
ture for ever ; he signs himself upon you as with a 
seal of deliberate and decisive power. His force is 
never the force of accident; the casual divinity of 
beauty which falls, as though direct from heaven, 
upon stray lines and phrases of some poets, falls 
never by any such heavenly chance on his; his 
strength of impulse is matched by his strength of 
will ; he never works more by instinct than by reso- 
lution ; he knows what he would have and what he 
will do, and gains his end and does his work with 
full conscience of purpose and insistence of de- 
sign. By the might of a great will seconded by the 



SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS 55 

force of a great hand he won the place he holds 
against all odds of rivalry in a race of rival 
giants. ' ' 

On the other hand, Mr. Swinburne is constantly 
liable on this same line to lapse into flagrant levity 
and perversity of taste ; as in saying that he cannot 
consider Wordsworth "as mere poet" equal to 
Coleridge as mere poet; in speaking of Alfred de 
Musset as "the female page or attendant dwarf" 
of Byron, and his poems as "decoctions of watered 
Byronism"; or in alluding jauntily and en passant 
to Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin as "the most 
perfect and exquisite book of modern times." 

To note, however, the points at which Mr. Swin- 
burne's judgment hits the mark, or the points at 
which it misses it, is comparatively superfluous, in- 
asmuch as both of these cases seem to us essentially 
accidental. His book is not at all a book of judg- 
ment ; it is a book of pure imagination. His genius 
is for style simply, and not in the least for thought 
nor for real analysis; he goes through the motions 
of criticism, and makes a considerable show of 
logic and philosophy, but with deep appreciation 
his writing seems to us to have very little to do. 

He is an imaginative commentator, often of a 
very splendid kind, but he is never a real inter- 
preter and rarely a trustworthy guide. He is a 
writer, and a writer in constant quest of a theme. 
He has an inordinate sense of the picturesque, and 



56 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

he finds his theme in those subjects and those writ- 
ers which gratify it. When they gratify it highly, 
he conceives a boundless relish for them ; they give 
him his chance, and he turns-on the deluge of his 
exorbitant homage. His imagination kindles, he 
abounds in their own sense, when they give him an 
inch he takes an ell, and quite loses sight of the 
subject in the entertainment he finds in his own 
word-spinning. In this respect he is extraor- 
dinarily accomplished: he very narrowly misses 
having a magnificent style. On the imaginative 
side, his style is almost complete, and seems ca- 
pable of doing everything that pieturesqueness de- 
mands. There are few writers of our day who 
could have produced this description of a thunder- 
storm at sea. Mr. Swinburne gives it to us as the 
likeness of Victor Hugo 's genius : — 

" About midnight, the thundercloud was full 
overhead, full of incessant sound and fire, lighten- 
ing and darkening so rapidly that it seemed to have 
life, and a delight in its life. At the same hour, 
the sky was clear to the west, and all along the sea- 
line there sprang and sank as to music a restless 
dance or chase of summer lightnings across the 
lower sky : a race and riot of lights, beautiful and 
rapid as a course of shining Oceanides along the 
tremulous floor of the sea. Eastward, at the same 
moment, the space of clear sky was higher and 



SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS 57 

wider, a splendid semicircle of too intense purity to 
be called blue; it was of no colour nameable by 
man; and midway in it, between the stars and the 
sea, hung the motionless full moon ; Artemis watch- 
ing with serene splendour of scorn the battle of Ti- 
tans and the revel of nymphs from her stainless 
and Olympian summit of divine indifferent light. 
Underneath and about us, the sea was paved with 
flame; the whole water trembled and hissed with 
phosphoric fire; even through the wind and thun- 
der I could hear the crackling and sputtering of the 
water-sparks. In the same heaven and in the 
same hour there shone at once the three contrasted 
glories, golden and fiery and white, of moonlight, 
and of the double lightning, forked and sheet ; and 
under all this miraculous heaven lay a flaming floor 
of water.' ' 

But with this extravagant development of the 
imagination there is no commensurate develop- 
ment either of the reason or of the moral sense. 
One of these defects is, to our mind, fatal to Mr. 
Swinburne 's style ; the other is fatal to his tone, to 
his temper, to his critical pretensions. His style 
is without measure, without discretion, without 
sense of what to take and what to leave; after a 
few pages, it becomes intolerably fatiguing. It is 
always listening to itself — always turning its head 
over its shoulders to see its train flowing behind it. 



58 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

The train shimmers and tumbles in a very gorgeous 
fashion, but the rustle of its embroidery is fatally 
importunate. 

Mr. Swinburne is a dozen times too verbose; at 
least one-half of his phrases are what the French 
call phrases in the air. One-half of his sentence is 
always a repetition, for mere fancy's sake and 
nothing more, of the meaning of the other half — a 
play upon its words, an echo, a reflection, a dupli- 
cation. This trick, of course, makes a writer for- 
midably prolix. What we have called the absence 
of the moral sense of the writer of these essays is, 
however, their most disagreeable feature. By this 
we do not mean that Mr. Swinburne is not didactic, 
nor edifying, nor devoted to pleading the cause of 
virtue. We mean simply that his moral plummet 
does not sink at all, and that when he pretends to 
drop it he is simply dabbling in the relatively very 
shallow pool of the picturesque. 

A sense of the picturesque so refined as Mr. 
Swinburne's will take one a great way, but it will 
by no means, in dealing with things whose great 
value is in what they tell us of human character, 
take one all the way. One breaks down with it (if 
one treats it as one's sole support) sooner or later 
in aesthetics; one breaks down with it very soon 
indeed in psychology. 

We do not remember in this whole volume a sin- 
gle instance of delicate moral discrimination — a sin- 



SWINBURNE'S ESSAYS 59 

gle case in which the moral note has been struck, in 
which the idea betrays the smallest acquaintance 
with the conscience. The moral realm for Mr. 
Swinburne is simply a brilliant chiaroscuro of cos- 
tume and posture. This makes all Mr. Swin- 
burne 's magnificent talk about Victor Hugo 's great 
criminals and monstrosities, about Shelley's Count 
Cenci, and Browning's Guido Franchesini, and 
about dramatic figures generally, quite worthless as 
anything but amusing fantasy. As psychology it 
is, to our sense, extremely puerile; for we do not 
mean simply to say that the author does not under- 
stand morality — a charge to which he would be 
probably quite indifferent ; but that he does not at 
all understand immorality. Such a passage as his 
rhapsody upon Victor Hugo's Josiane ("such a 
pantheress may be such a poetess," etc.) means ab- 
solutely nothing. It is entertaining as pictorial 
writing — though even in this respect, as we have 
said, thanks to excess and redundancy, it is the pic- 
turesque spoiled rather than achieved; but as an 
attempt at serious analysis it seems to us, like many 
of its companions, simply ghastly — ghastly in its 
poverty of insight and its pretension to make mere 
lurid imagery do duty as thought. 



THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS 



I. A review of The Life and Death of Jason: A poem. 
By William Morris, Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1867, 
Originally published in North American Review, October, 
1867. 

II. A review of The Earthly Paradise: A poem. By 
William Morris, Boston: Roberts Bros. 1868. Origin- 
ally published in The Nation, July 9, 1868. 

The Earthly Paradise; Parts I and II as originally 
published in London by F. S. Ellis in 1868, is in one volume, 
and was issued the same year in Boston by Roberts Brothers. 
Parts III and IV were issued as volumes II and III under 
the same title, in London in 1870, and in Boston in 1870- 
71. 



THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS 

I. THE LIFE AND DEATH OP JASON 

IN this poetical history of the fortunate — the un- 
fortunate — Jason, Mr. Morris has written a book 
of real value. It is some time since we have met 
with a work of imagination of so thoroughly satis- 
factory a character, — a work read with an enjoy- 
ment so unalloyed and so untempered by the desire 
to protest and to criticise. The poetical firmament 
within these recent years has been all alive with 
unprophesied comets and meteors, many of them of 
extraordinary brilliancy, but most of them very 
rapid in their passage. Mr. Morris gives us the 
comfort of feeling that he is a fixed star, and that 
his radiance is not likely to be extinguished in a 
draught of wind, — after the fashion of Mr. Alex- 
ander Smith, Mr. Swinburne and Miss Ingelow. 

Mr. Morris 's poem is ushered into the world with 
a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the 
author of the too famous Poems and Ballads, — a 
circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree 
prejudicial to its success. But we hasten to assure 
all persons whom the knowledge of Mr. Swin- 
burne's enthusiasm may have led to mistrust the 
63 



64 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

character of the work, that it has to our perception 
nothing in common with this gentleman's own pro- 
ductions, and that his article proves very little more 
than that his sympathies are wiser than his per- 
formance. If Mr. Morris's poem may be said to 
remind us of the manner of any other writer, it is 
simply of that of Chaucer ; and to resemble Chaucer 
is a great safeguard against resembling Swinburne. 

The Life and Death of Jason, then, is a narrative 
poem on a Greek subject, written in a genuine 
English style. With the subject all reading people 
are familiar, and we have no need to retrace its de- 
tails. But it is perhaps not amiss to transcribe the 
few pregnant lines of prose into which, at the out- 
set, Mr. Morris has condensed the argument of his 
poem : — 

"Jason the son of J3son, king of Iolchos, having 
come to man's estate, demanded of Pelias his 
father's kingdom, which he held wrongfully. But 
Pelias answered, that if he would bring from Col- 
chis the golden fleece of the ram that had carried 
Phryxus thither, he would yield him his right. 
Whereon Jason sailed to Colchis in the ship Argo, 
with other heroes, and by means of Medea, the 
king 's daughter, won the fleece ; and carried off also 
Medea; and so, after many troubles, came back to 
Iolchos again. There, by Medea's wiles, was Pelias 
slain; but Jason went to Corinth, and lived with 
Medea happily, till he was taken with the love of 



TEE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS 65 

Glauce, the king's daughter of Corinth, and must 
needs wed her; whom also Medea destroyed, and 
fled to ^Egeus at Athens ; and not long after Jason 
died strangely.' ' 

The style of this little fragment of prose is not 
an unapt measure of the author's poetical style, — 
quaint, but not too quaint, more Anglo-Saxon than 
Latin, and decidedly laconic. For in spite of the 
great length of his work, his manner is by no means 
diffuse. His story is a long one, and he wishes to do 
it justice ; but the movement is rapid and business- 
like, and the poet is quite guiltless of any wanton 
lingering along the margin of the subject matter, — 
after the manner, for instance, of Keats, — to whom, 
individually, however, we make this tendency no 
reproach. Mr. Morris's subject is immensely rich, 
— heavy with its richness, — and in the highest de- 
gree romantic and poetical. For the most part, of 
course, he found not only the great contours, but 
the various incidents and episodes, ready drawn to 
his hand; but still there was enough wanting to 
make a most exhaustive drain upon his ingenuity 
and his imagination. And not only these faculties 
have been brought into severe exercise, but the 
strictest good taste and good sense were called into 
play, together with a certain final gift which we 
hardly know how to name, and which is by no 
means common, even among very clever poets, — a 
comprehensive sense of form, of proportion, and of 



66 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

real completeness, without which the most brilliant 
efforts of the imagination are a mere agglomeration 
of ill-reconciled beauties. The legend of Jason is 
full of strangely constructed marvels and elaborate 
prodigies and horrors, calculated to task heavily 
an author's adroitness. 

We have so pampered and petted our sense of the 
ludicrous of late years, that it is quite the spoiled 
child of the house, and without its leave no guest 
can be honourably entertained. It is very true 
that the atmosphere of Grecian mythology is so 
entirely an artificial one, that we are seldom 
tempted to refer its weird anomalous denizens 
to our standard of truth and beauty. Truth, 
indeed, is at once put out of the question ; but one 
would say beforehand, that many of the creations 
of Greek fancy were wanting even in beauty, or at 
least in that ease and simplicity which has been ac- 
quired in modern times by force of culture. But 
habit and tradition have reconciled us to these 
things in their native forms, and Mr. Morris's skill 
reconciles us to them in his modern and composite 
English. 

The idea, for instance, of a flying ram, seems, to 
an undisciplined fancy, a not especially happy 
creation, nor a very promising theme for poetry; 
but Mr. Morris, without diminishing its native 
oddity, has given it an ample romantic dig- 
nity. So, again, the sowing of the dragon's teeth 



THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS 67 

at Colchis, and the springing up of mutually op- 
posed armed men, seems too complex and recon- 
dite a scene to be vividly and gracefully realized; 
but as it stands, it is one of the finest passages in 
Mr. Morris's poem. His great stumbling-block, 
however, we take it, was the necessity of maintain- 
ing throughout the dignity and prominence of his 
hero. From the moment that Medea comes into the 
poem, Jason falls into the second place, and keeps 
it to the end. She is the all-wise and all-brave 
helper and counsellor at Colchis, and the guardian 
angel of the returning journey. She saves her 
companions from the Cireean enchantments, and 
she withholds them from the embraces of the 
Sirens. She effects the death of Pelias, and assures 
the successful return of the Argonauts. And 
finally — as a last claim upon her interest — she is 
slighted and abandoned by the man of her love. 
Without question, then, she is the central figure 
of the poem, — a powerful and enchanting figure, — 
a creature of barbarous arts, and of exquisite hu- 
man passions. 'Jason accordingly possesses only 
that indirect hold upon our attention which belongs 
to the Virgilian ^neas; although Mr. Morris has 
avoided Virgil's error of now and then allowing 
his hero to be contemptible. 

A large number, however, of far greater draw- 
backs than any we are able to mention could not 
materially diminish the powerful beauty of this 



68 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

fantastic legend. It is as rich in adventure as the 
Odyssey, and very much simpler. Its prime ele- 
ments are of the most poetical and delightful kind. 
What can be more thrilling than the idea of a 
great boatful of warriors embarking upon dreadful 
seas, not for pleasure, nor for conquest, nor for 
any material advantage, but for the simple discov- 
ery of a jealously watched, magically guarded 
relic? There is in the character of the object of 
their quest something heroically unmarketable, or 
at least unavailable. 

But of course the story owes a vast deal to its epi- 
sodes, and these have lost nothing in Mr. Morris's 
hands. One of the most beautiful — the well known 
adventure of Hylas — occurs at the very outset. 
The beautiful young man, during a halt of the ship, 
wanders inland through the forest, and, passing 
beside a sylvan stream, is espied and incontinently 
loved by the water nymphs, who forthwith " de- 
tach' ' one of their number to work his seduction. 
This young lady assumes the disguise and speech 
of a Northern princess, clad in furs, and in this 
character sings to her victim "a sweet song, sung 
not yet to any man. ' ' Very sweet and truly lyrical 
it is like all the songs scattered through Mr. Mor- 
ris's narrative. We are, indeed, almost in doubt 
whether the most beautiful passages in the poem do 
not occur in the series of songs in the fourteenth 
book. 



THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS 69 

The ship has already touched at the island of 
Circe, and the sailors, thanks to the earnest warn- 
ings of Medea, have abstained from setting foot 
on the fatal shore ; while Medea has, in turn, been 
warned by the enchantress against the allurements 
of the Sirens. As soon as the ship draws nigh, 
these fair beings begin to utter their irresistible 
notes. All eyes are turned lovingly on the shore, 
the rowers' charmed muscles relax, and the ship 
drifts landward. But Medea exhorts and entreats 
her companions to preserve their course. Jason 
himself is not untouched, as Mr. Morris delicately 
tells us, — * ' a moment Jason gazed. ' ' But Orpheus 
smites his lyre before it is too late, and stirs the 
languid blood of his comrades. The Sirens strike 
their harps amain, and a conflict of song arises. 
The Sirens sing of the cold, the glittering, the idle 
delights of their submarine homes; while Orpheus 
tells of the warm and pastoral landscapes of 
Greece. We have no space for quotation ; of course 
Orpheus carries the day. But the finest and most 
delicate practical sense is shown in the alternation 
of the two lyrical arguments, — the soulless sweet- 
ness of the one, and the deep human richness of the 
other. 

There is throughout Mr. Morris's poem a great 
unity and evenness of excellence, which make se- 
lection and quotation difficult; but of impressive 
touches in our reading we noticed a very great 



70 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

number. "We content ourselves with mentioning a 
single one. When Jason has sown his bag of 
dragon's teeth at Colchis, and the armed fighters 
have sprung up along the furrows, and under the 
spell contrived by Medea have torn each other to 
death : — 

" One man was left alive, but wounded sore, 
Who, staring round about and seeing no more 
His brothers' spears against him, fixed his eyes 
Upon the queller of those mysteries. 
Then dreadfully they gleamed, and with no word, 
He tottered towards him with uplifted sword. 
But scarce he made three paces down the field, 
Ere chill death seized his heart, and on his shield 
Clattering he fell." 

We have not spoken of Mr. Morris's versification 
nor of his vocabulary. We have only room to say 
that, to our perception, the first in its facility and 
harmony, and the second in its abundance and 
studied simplicity, leave nothing to be desired. 
There are of course faults and errors in his poem, 
but there are none that are not trivial and easily 
pardoned in the light of the fact that he has given 
us a work of consummate art and of genuine 
beauty. He has foraged in a treasure-house; he 
has visited the ancient world, and come back with 
a massive cup of living Greek wine. His project 
was no light task, but he has honourably fulfilled 



TEE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS 71 

it. He has enriched the language with a narrative 
poem which we are sure that the public will not 
suffer to fall into the ranks of honoured but un- 
cherished works, — objects of vague and sapient 
reference, — but will continue to read and to enjoy. 
In spite of its length, the interest of the story never 
flags, and as a work of art it never ceases to be 
pure. To the jaded intellects of the present mo- 
ment, distracted with the strife of creeds and the 
conflict of theories, it opens a glimpse into a world 
where they will be called upon neither to choose, to 
criticise, nor to believe, but simply to feel, to look, 
and to listen. 

II. THE EARTHLY PARADISE 

This new volume of Mr. Morris is, we think, a 
book for all time; but it is especially a book for 
these ripening summer days. To sit in the open 
shade, inhaling the heated air, and, while you read 
these perfect fairy tales, these rich and pathetic 
human traditions to glance up from your page at 
the clouds and the trees, is to do as pleasant a thing 
as the heart of man can desire. Mr. Morris 's book 
abounds in all the sounds and sights and sensations 
of nature, in the warmth of the sunshine, the mur- 
mur of forests, and the breath of ocean-scented 
breezes. The fullness of physical existence which 
belongs to climates where life is spent in the open 
air, is largely diffused through its pages : 



72 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

, , . " Hot July was drawing to an end, 
And August came the fainting year to mend 

With fruit and grain; so 'neath the trellises, 
Nigh blossomless, did they lie well at ease, 
And watched the poppies burn across the grass, 

And o'er the bindweed's bells the brown bee pass, 
Still murmuring of his gains: windless and bright 
The morn had been, to help their dear delight. 

. . . Then a light wind arose 

That shook the light stems of that flowery close, 

And made men sigh for pleasure." 

This is a random specimen. As you read, the 
fictitious universe of the poem seems to expand and 
advance out of its remoteness, to surge musically 
about your senses, and merge itself utterly in the 
universe which surrounds you. The summer 
brightness of the real world goes halfway to meet 
it; and the beautiful figures which throb with life 
in Mr. Morris's stories pass lightly to and fro be- 
tween the realm of poetry and the mild atmosphere 
of fact. This quality was half the charm of the 
author's former poem, The Life and Death of 
Jason, published last summer. We seemed really 
to follow, beneath the changing sky, the fantastic 
boatload of wanderers in their circuit of the an- 
cient world. For people compelled to stay at home, 
the perusal of the book in a couple of mornings 
was very nearly as good as a fortnight's holiday. 
The poem appeared to reflect so clearly and forcibly 



THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS 73 

the poet's natural sympathies with the external 
world, and his joy in personal contact with it, that 
the reader obtained something very like a sense of 
physical transposition, without either physical or 
intellectual weariness. 

This ample and direct presentment of the joys 
of action and locomotion seems to us to impart to 
these two works a truly national and English tone. 
They taste not perhaps of the English soil, but of 
those strong English sensibilities which the great 
insular race carry with them through their wander- 
ings, which they preserve and apply with such en- 
ergy in every terrestrial clime, and which make 
them such incomparable travellers. We heartily 
recommend such persons as have a desire to ac- 
commodate their reading to the season — as are 
vexed with a delicate longing to place themselves 
intellectually in relation with the genius of the 
summer — to take this Earthly Paradise with them 
to the country. 

The book is a collection of tales in verse — found, 
without exception, we take it, rather than imagined, 
and linked together, somewhat loosely, by a narra- 
tive prologue. The following is the " argument " 
of the prologue — already often enough quoted, but 
pretty enough, in its ingenious prose, to quote 
again : — 

"Certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway, 
having considered all that they had heard of the 



74 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it, and, after 
many troubles and the lapse of many years, came 
old men to some western land, of which they had 
never before heard : there they died, when they had 
dwelt there certain years, much honoured of the 
strange people. " 

The adventures of these wanderers, told by one 
of their number, Rolf the Norseman, born at By- 
zantium — a happy origin for the teller of a heroic 
tale, as the author doubtless felt — make, to begin 
with, a poem of considerable length, and of a beauty 
superior perhaps to that of the succeeding tales. 
An admirable romance of adventure has Mr. Mor- 
ris unfolded in the melodious energy of this half- 
hurrying, half-lingering narrative — a romance to 
make old hearts beat again with the boyish long- 
ing for transmarine mysteries, and to plunge boys 
themselves into a delicious agony of unrest. 

The story is a tragedy, or very near it — as what 
story of the search for an Earthly Paradise could 
fail to be ? Fate reserves for the poor storm-tossed 
adventurers a sort of fantastic compromise between 
their actual misery and their ideal bliss, whereby a 
kindly warmth is infused into the autumn of their 
days, and to the reader, at least, a very tolerable 
Earthly Paradise is laid open. The elders and 
civic worthies of the western land which finally 
sheltered them summon them every month to a 
feast, where, when all grosser desires have been 



THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS 75 

duly pacified, the company sit at their ease and 
listen to the recital of stories. Mr. Morris gives in 
this volume the stories of the six midmonths of 
the year, two tales being allotted to each month — 
one from the Greek Mythology, and one, to express 
it broadly, of a Gothic quality. He announces a 
second series in which, we infer, he will in the 
same manner give us the stories rehearsed at the 
winter fireside. 

The Greek stories are the various histories of 
Atalanta, of Perseus, of Cupid and Psyche, of Al- 
cestis, of Atys, the hapless son of Croesus, and of 
Pygmalion. The companion pieces, which always 
serve excellently well to place in relief the perfect 
pagan character of their elder mates, deal of course 
with elements less generally known. 

" Atalanta 's Race/' the first of Mr. Morris's 
Greek legends, is to our mind almost the best. 
There is something wonderfully simple and child- 
like in the story, and the author has given it ample 
dignity, at the same time that he has preserved this 
quality. 

Most vividly does he present the mild invin- 
cibility of his fleet-footed heroine and the half-boy- 
ish simplicity of her demeanour — a perfect model 
of a belle inhumaine. But the most beautiful pas- 
sage in the poem is the description of the vigil of 
the love-sick Milanion in the lonely sea-side temple 
of Venus. The author has conveyed with exquisite 



76 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

art the sense of devout stillness and of pagan sanc- 
tity which invests this remote and prayerful spot. 
The yellow torch-light, 

"Wherein with fluttering gown and half -bared limb 
The temple damsels sung their evening hymn;" 

the sound of the shallow flowing sea without, the 
young man's restless sleep on the pavement, be- 
sprinkled with the ocean spray, the apparition of 
the goddess with the early dawn, bearing the gol- 
den apple — all these delicate points are presented 
in the light of true poetry. 

The narrative of the adventures of Danae and 
of Perseus and Andromeda is, with the exception 
of the tale of Cupid and Psyche which follows it, 
the longest piece in the volume. Of the two, we 
think we prefer the latter. Unutterably touching 
is the career of the tender and helpless Psyche, and 
most impressive the terrible hostility of Venus. 
The author, we think, throughout manages this 
lady extremely well. She appears to us in a sort 
of rosy dimness, through which she looms as for- 
midable as she is beautiful, and gazing with "gen- 
tle eyes and unmoved smiles/ ' 

" Such as in Cyprus, the fair blossomed isle, 
When on the altar in the summer night 
They pile the roses up for her delight, 
Men see within their hearts." 



TEE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS 77 

"The Love of Alcestis" is the beautiful story of 
the excellent wife who, when her husband was ill, 
gave up her life, so that he might recover and live 
for ever. Half the interest here, however, lies in 
the servitude of Apollo in disguise, and in the 
touching picture of the radiant god doing in per- 
fection the homely work of his office, and yet from 
time to time emitting flashes, as it were, of genius 
and deity, while the good Admetus observes him 
half in kindness and half in awe. 

The story of the "Son of Croesus," the poor 
young man who is slain by his best friend because 
the gods had foredoomed it, is simple, pathetic, and 
brief. The finest and sweetest poem in the volume, 
to our taste, is the tale of "Pygmalion and the 
Image.' ' The merit of execution is perhaps 
not appreciably greater here than in the other 
pieces, but the legend is so unutterably charming 
that it claims precedence of its companions. As 
beautiful as anything in all our later poetry, we 
think, is the description of the growth and domi- 
nance in the poor sculptor's heart of his marvellous 
passion for the stony daughter of his hands. 
Borne along on the steady, changing flow of his 
large and limpid verse, the author glides into the 
situation with an ease and grace and fullness of 
sympathy worthy of a great master. Here, as 
elsewhere, there is no sign of effort or of strain. In 
spite of the studied and recherche character of his 



78 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

diction, there is not a symptom of affectation in 
thought or speech. We seem in this tale of "Pyg- 
malion" truly to inhabit the bright and silent work- 
room of a great Greek artist, and, standing among 
shapes and forms of perfect beauty, to breathe the 
incense-tainted air in which lovely statues were 
conceived and shining stones chiselled into immor- 
tality. 

Mr. Morris is indubitably a sensuous poet, to his 
credit be it said; his senses are constantly proffer- 
ing their testimony and crying out their delight. 
But while they take their freedom, they employ it 
in no degree to their own debasement. Just as 
there is modesty of temperament we conceive there 
is modesty of imagination, and Mr. Morris possesses 
the latter distinction. The total absence of it is, 
doubtless, the long and short of Mr. Swinburne's 
various troubles. We may imagine Mr. Swin- 
burne making a very clever poem of this story 
of "Pygmalion," but we cannot fancy him making 
it anything less than utterly disagreeable. The 
thoroughly agreeable way in which Mr. Morris tells 
it is what especially strikes us. We feel that his 
imagination is equally fearless and irreproachable, 
and that while he tells us what we may call a sensu- 
ous story in all its breadth, he likewise tells it in all 
its purity. It has, doubtless, an impure side; but 
of the two he prefers the other. While Pygmalion 



TEE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS 79 

is all aglow with his unanswered passion, he one 
day sits down before his image : 

" And at the last drew forth a book of rhymes, 
Wherein were writ the tales of many climes, 
And read aloud the sweetness hid therein 
Of lovers' sorrows and their tangled sin." 

He reads aloud to his marble torment: would Mr. 
Swinburne have touched that note ? 

We have left ourselves no space to describe in 
detail the other series of tales — "The Man born to 
be King," "The Proud King/' "The Writing on 
the Image," "The Lady of the Land," "The 
Watching of the Falcon, ' ' and ' ' Ogier the Dane. ' ' 

The author in his Jason identified himself with 
the successful treatment of Greek subjects to such 
a degree as to make it easy to suppose that these 
matters were the specialty of his genius. But in 
these romantic modern stories the same easy power 
is revealed, the same admirable union of natural 
gifts and cultivated perceptions. Mr. Morris is 
evidently a poet in the broad sense of the word — 
a singer of human joys and sorrows, whenever and 
wherever found. His somewhat artificial diction, 
which would seem to militate against our claim 
that his genius is of the general and comprehensive 
order, is, we imagine, simply an achievement of his 
own. It is not imposed from without, but de- 



80 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

veloped from within. Whatever may be said of it, 
it certainly will not be accused of being unpoetical ; 
and except this charge, what serious one can be 
made? 

The author's style — according to our impression 
— is neither Chaucerian, Spenserian, nor imitative ; 
it is literary, indeed, but it has a freedom and ir- 
regularity, an adaptability to the movements of the 
author's mind, which make it an ample vehicle of 
poetical utterance. He says in this language of his 
own the most various and the most truthful things ; 
he moves, melts, and delights. Such at least, is our 
own experience. Other persons, we know, find it 
difficult to take him entirely au serieux. But we, 
taking him — and our critical duties too — in the 
most serious manner our mind permits of, feel 
strongly impelled, both by gratitude and by re- 
flection, to pronounce him a noble and delightful 
poet. To call a man healthy nowadays is almost 
an insult — invalids learn so many secrets. But the 
health of the intellect is often promoted by physical 
disability. We say therefore, finally, that however 
the faculty may have been promoted — with the 
minimum of suffering, we certainly hope — Mr. 
Morris is a supremely healthy writer. This poem is 
marked by all that is broad and deep in nature, and 
all that is elevating, profitable, and curious in art. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS 



A review of Essays in Criticism. By Matthew Arnold, 
Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Boston: 
Tieknor and Fields. 1865. Originally published in North 
American Review, July, 1865. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS 

ME. ARNOLD'S Essays in Criticism come to 
American readers with a reputation already 
made, — the reputation of a charming style, a great 
deal of excellent feeling, and an almost equal 
amount of questionable reasoning. It is for us 
either to confirm the verdict passed in the author's 
own country, or to judge his work afresh. It is 
often the fortune of English writers to find mitiga- 
tion of sentence in the United States. 

The Essays contained in this volume are on 
purely literary subjects; which is for us, by itself, 
a strong recommendation. English literature, es- 
pecially contemporary literature, is, compared with 
that of France and Germany, very poor in collec- 
tions of this sort. A great deal of criticism is writ- 
ten, but little of it is kept; little of it is deemed to 
contain any permanent application. Mr. Arnold 
will doubtless find in this fact — if indeed he has not 
already signalized it — but another proof of the in- 
feriority of the English to the Continental school 
of criticism, and point to it as a baleful effect of 
the narrow practical spirit which animates, or, as 
he would probably say, paralyzes, the former. But 
83 



84 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

not only is his book attractive as a whole, from its 
exclusively literary character; the subject of each 
essay is moreover particularly interesting. The 
first paper is on the function of Criticism at the 
present time; a question, if not more important, 
perhaps more directly pertinent here than in Eng- 
land. The second, discussing the literary influence 
of Academies, contains a great deal of valuable ob- 
servation and reflection in a small compass and un- 
der an inadequate title. The other essays are upon 
the two De Guerins, Heinrich Heine, Pagan and 
Mediaeval Religious Sentiment, Joubert, Spinoza, 
and Marcus Aurelius. The first two articles are, 
to our mind, much the best; the next in order of 
excellence is the paper on Joubert ; while the others, 
with the exception, perhaps, of that on Spinoza, are 
of about equal merit. 

Mr. Arnold's style has been praised at once too 
much and too little. Its resources are decidedly 
limited ; but if the word had not become so cheap, 
we should nevertheless call it fascinating. This 
quality implies no especial force; it rests in this 
case on the fact that, whether or not you agree with 
the matter beneath it, the manner inspires you with 
a personal affection for the author. It expresses 
great sensibility, and at the same time great good- 
nature; it indicates a mind both susceptible and 
healthy. "With the former element alone it would 
savour of affectation; with the latter, it would be 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS 85 

coarse. As it stands, it represents a spirit both 
sensitive and generous. We can best describe it, 
perhaps, by the word sympathetic. It exhibits 
frankly, and without detriment to its national char- 
acter, a decided French influence. Mr. Arnold is 
too wise to attempt to write French English; he 
probably knows that a language can only be indi- 
rectly enriched ; but as nationality is eminently a 
matter of form, he knows too that he can really vio- 
late nothing so long as he adheres to the English 
letter. 

His Preface is a striking example of the intelli- 
gent amiability which animates his style. His two 
leading Essays were, on their first appearance, 
made the subject of much violent contention, their 
moral being deemed little else than a wholesale 
schooling of the English press by the French pro- 
gramme. Nothing could have better proved the 
justice of Mr. Arnold's remarks upon the "pro- 
vincial" character of the English critical method 
than the reception which they provoked. He now 
acknowledges this reception in a short introduction, 
which admirably reconciles smoothness of temper 
with sharpness of wit. The taste of this perform- 
ance has been questioned ; but wherever it may err, 
it is assuredly not in being provincial ; it is essen- 
tially civil. Mr. Arnold 's amiability is, in our eye, 
a strong proof of his wisdom. If he were a few de- 
grees more short-sighted, he might have less equa- 



86 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

nimity at his command. Those who sympathise with 
him warmly will probably like him best as he is; 
but with such as are only half his friends, this free- 
dom from party passion, from what is after all but 
a lawful professional emotion, will argue against 
his sincerity. 

For ourselves, we doubt not that Mr. Arnold pos- 
sesses thoroughly what the French call the courage 
of his opinions. When you lay down a proposition 
which is forthwith controverted, it is of course op- 
tional with you to take up the cudgels in its de- 
fence. If you are deeply convinced of its truth, 
you will perhaps be content to leave it to take care 
of itself; or, at all events, you will not go out of 
your way to push its fortunes ; for you will reflect 
that in the long run an opinion often borrows 
credit from the forbearance of its patrons. In the 
long run, we say; it will meanwhile cost you an 
occasional pang to see your cherished theory 
turned into a football by the critics. A football is 
not, as such, a very respectable object, and the more 
numerous the players, the more ridiculous it be- 
comes. Unless, therefore, you are very confident 
of your ability to rescue it from the chaos of kicks, 
you will best consult its interests by not mingling 
in the game. Such has been Mr. Arnold's choice. 
His opponents say that he is too much of a poet to 
be a critic ; he is certainly too much of a poet to be 
a disputant. In the Preface in question he has 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS 87 

abstained from reiterating any of the views put 
forth in the two offensive Essays; he has simply 
taken a delicate literary vengeance upon his ad- 
versaries. 

For Mr. Arnold 's critical feeling and observation, 
used independently of his judgment, we profess a 
keen relish. He has these qualities, at any rate, 
of a good critic, whether or not he have the others, 
— the science and the logic. It is hard to say 
whether the literary critic is more called upon to 
understand or to feel. It is certain that he will 
accomplish little unless he can feel acutely; al- 
though it is perhaps equally certain that he will 
become weak the moment that he begins to "work," 
as we may say, his natural sensibilities. The best 
critic is probably he who leaves his feelings out of 
account, and relies upon reason for success. If 
he actually possesses delicacy of feeling, his work 
will be delicate without detriment to its solidity. 
The complaint of Mr. Arnold's critics is that his 
arguments are too sentimental. Whether this com- 
plaint is well founded, we shall hereafter inquire; 
let us determine first what sentiment has done for 
him. It has given him, in our opinion, his great- 
est charm and his greatest worth. Hundreds of 
other critics have stronger heads; few, in Eng- 
land at least, have more delicate perceptions. We 
regret that we have not the space to confirm this 
assertion by extracts. We must refer the reader to 



88 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

the book itself, where he will find on every page an 
illustration of our meaning. He will find one, 
first of all, in the apostrophe to the University of 
Oxford, at the close of the Preface, — ' ' home of lost 
causes and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names 
and impossible loyalties." This is doubtless noth- 
ing but sentiment, but it seizes a shade of truth, 
and conveys it with a directness which is not at 
the command of logical demonstration. Such a 
process might readily prove, with the aid of a host 
of facts, that the University is actually the abode 
of much retarding conservatism; a fine critical 
instinct alone, and the measure of audacity which 
accompanies such an instinct, could succeed in 
placing her on the side of progress by boldly salut- 
ing her as the Queen of Romance: romance being 
the deadly enemy of the commonplace; the com- 
monplace being the fast ally of Philistinism, and 
Philistinism the heaviest drag upon the march of 
civilisation. 

Mr. Arnold is very fond of quoting Goethe's 
eulogy upon Schiller, to the effect that his friend's 
greatest glory was to have left so far behind him 
was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine, that bane of 
mankind, the common. Exactly how much the in- 
scrutable Goethe made of this fact, it is hard at 
this day to determine; but it will seem to many 
readers that Mr. Arnold makes too much of it. 
Perhaps he does, for himself; but for the public 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS 89 

in general he decidedly does not. One of the chief 
duties of criticism is to exalt the importance of the 
ideal ; and Goethe 's speech has a long career in 
prospect before we can say with the vulgar that 
it is "played out." Its repeated occurrence in 
Mr. Arnold's pages is but another instance of 
poetic feeling subserving the ends of criticism. 

The famous comment upon the girl Wragg, over 
which the author's opponents made so merry, we 
likewise owe — we do not hesitate to declare it — 
to this same poetic feeling. Why cast discredit 
upon so valuable an instrument of truth? Why 
not wait at least until it is used in the service of 
error? The worst that can be said of the para- 
graph in question is, that it is a great ado about 
nothing. All thanks, say we, to the critic who 
will pick up such nothings as these ; for if he neg- 
lects them, they are blindly trodden under foot. 
They may not be especially valuable, but they are 
for that very reason the critic's particular care. 
Great truths take care of themselves; great truths 
are carried aloft by philosophers and poets; the 
critic deals in contributions to truth. 

Another illustration of the nicety of Mr. 
Arnold's feeling is furnished by his remarks upon 
the quality of distinction as exhibited in Maurice 
and Eugenie de Guerin, "that quality which at last 
inexorably corrects the world's blunders and fixes 
the world's ideals, [which] procures that the popu- 



90 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

lar poet shall not pass for a Pindar, the popular 
historian for a Tacitus, nor the popular preacher 
for a Bossuet." Another is offered by his inci- 
dental remarks upon Coleridge, in the article on 
Joubert; another, by the remarkable felicity with 
which he has translated Maurice de Guerin's 
Centaur; and another, by the whole body of cita- 
tions with which, in his second Essay, he fortifies 
his proposition that the establishment in England 
of an authority answering to the French Academy 
would have arrested certain evil tendencies of 
English literature, — for to nothing more offensive 
than this, as far as we can see, does this argument 
amount. 

In the first and most important of his Es- 
says Mr. Arnold puts forth his views upon the 
actual duty of criticism. They may be summed 
up as follows. Criticism has no concern with the 
practical; its function is simply to get at the best 
thought which is current, — to see things in them- 
selves as they are, — to be disinterested. Criticism 
can be disinterested, says Mr. Arnold, 

" by keeping from practice ; by resolutely following the 
law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of 
the mind on all subjects which it touches, by steadily 
refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior political, 
practical considerations about ideas which plenty of 
people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps 
ought often to be attached to them, which in this coun- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS 91 

try, at any rate, are certain to be attached to tEem, but 
which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its busi- 
ness is simply to know the best that is known and 
thought in the world, and, by in its turn making this 
known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its 
business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due 
ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave 
alone all questions of practical consequences and appli- 
cations, — questions which will never fail to have due 
prominence given to them." 

We used just now a word of which Mr. Arnold 
is very fond, — a word of which the general reader 
may require an explanation, but which, when ex- 
plained, he will be likely to find indispensable; 
we mean the word Philistine. The term is of 
German origin, and has no English synonyme. 
"At Soli," remarks Mr. Arnold, "I imagined they 
did not talk of solecisms; and here, at the very 
head-quarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Phil- 
istinism." The word Spicier, used by Mr. Arnold 
as a French synonyme, is not so good as bourgeois, 
and to those who know that bourgeois means a citi- 
zen, and who reflect that a citizen is a person 
seriously interested in the maintenance of order, 
the German term may now assume a more special 
significance. An English review briefly defines 
it by saying that "it applies to the fat-headed 
respectable public in general." This definition 
must satisfy us here. The Philistine portion of the 



92 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

English press, by which we mean the considerably 
larger portion, received Mr. Arnold's novel pro- 
gramme of criticism with the uncompromising 
disapprobation which was' to be expected from a 
literary body, the principle of whose influence, or 
indeed of whose being is its subservience, through 
its various members, to certain political and re- 
ligious interests. 

Mr. Arnold's general theory was offensive 
enough ; but the conclusions drawn by him from the 
fact that English practice has been so long and 
so directly at variance with it, were such as to ex- 
cite the strongest animosity. Chief among these 
was the conclusion that this fact has retarded the 
development and vulgarised the character of the 
English mind, as compared with the French and 
the German mind. This rational inference may 
be nothing but a poet's flight; but for ourselves, 
we assent to it. It reaches us too. The facts 
collected by Mr. Arnold on this point have long 
wanted a voice. It has long seemed to us that, 
as a nation, the English are singularly incapable 
of large, of high, of general views. They are in- 
different to pure truth, to la verite vraie. Their 
views are almost exclusively practical, and it is in 
the nature of practical views to be narrow. They 
seldom indeed admit a fact but on compulsion; 
they demand of an idea some better recommenda- 
tion, some longer pedigree, than that it is true. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS 93 

That this lack of spontaneity in the English intel- 
lect is caused by the tendency of English criticism, 
or that it is to be corrected by a diversion, or even 
by a complete reversion, of this tendency, neither 
Mr. Arnold nor ourselves suppose, nor do we look 
upon such a result as desirable. The part which 
Mr. Arnold assigns to his reformed method of 
criticism is a purely tributary part. Its indirect 
result will be to quicken the naturally irrational ac- 
tion of the English mind; its direct result will be 
to furnish that mind with a larger stock of ideas 
than it has enjoyed under the time-honoured 
regime of Whig and Tory, High-Church and Low- 
Church organs. 

We may here remark, that Mr. Arnold's state- 
ment of his principles is open to some misinterpreta- 
tion, — an accident against which he has, perhaps, 
not sufficiently guarded it. For many persons the 
word practical is almost identical with the word 
useful, against which, on the other hand, they erect 
the word ornamental. Persons who are fond of 
regarding these two terms as irreconcilable, will 
have little patience with Mr. Arnold's scheme of 
criticism. They will look upon it as an organised 
preference of unprofitable speculation to common 
sense. But the great beauty of the critical move- 
ment advocated by Mr. Arnold is that in either di- 
rection its range of action is unlimited. It deals 
with plain facts as well as with the most exalted 



94 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

fancies ; but it deals with them only for the sake of 
the truth which is in them, and not for your sake, 
reader, and that of your party. It takes high 
ground, which is the ground of theory. It does 
not busy itself with consequences, which are all 
in all to you. Do not suppose that it for this 
reason pretends to ignore or to undervalue conse- 
quences; on the contrary, it is because it knows 
that consequences are inevitable that it leaves them 
alone. It cannot do two things at once ; it cannot 
serve two masters. Its business is to make truth 
generally accessible, and not to apply it. It is only 
on condition of having its hands free, that it can 
make truth generally accessible. We said just now 
that its duty was, among other things, to exalt, if 
possible, the importance of the ideal. We should 
perhaps have said the intellectual; that is, of the 
principle of understanding things. Its business is 
to urge the claims of all things to be understood. 
If this is its function in England, as Mr. Arnold 
represents, it seems to us that it is doubly its func- 
tion in this country. Here is no lack of votaries of 
the practical, of experimentalists, of empirics. The 
tendencies of our civilisation are certainly not such 
as foster a preponderance of morbid speculation. 
Our national genius inclines yearly more and more 
to resolve itself into a vast machine for sifting, in 
all things, the wheat from the chaff. American so- 
ciety is so shrewd, that we may safely allow it to 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS 95 

make application of the truths of the study. Only- 
let us keep it supplied with the truths of the 
study, and not with the half-truths of the forum. 
Let criticism take the stream of truth at its source, 
and then practice can take it half-way down. 
When criticism takes it half-way down, practice 
will come poorly off. 

If we have not touched upon the faults of Mr. 
Arnold's volume, it is because they are faults of 
detail, and because, when, as a whole, a book com- 
mands our assent, we do not incline to quarrel with 
its parts. Some of the parts in these Essays are 
weak, others are strong; but the impression which 
they all combine to leave is one of such beauty 
as to make us forget, not only their particular 
faults, but their particular merits. If we were 
asked what is the particular merit of a given es- 
say, we should reply that it is a merit much less 
common at the present day than is generally sup- 
posed, — the merit which pre-eminently character- 
ises Mr. Arnold's poems, the merit, namely, of hav- 
ing a subject. Each essay is about something. If 
a literary work now-a-days start with a certain 
topic, that is all that is required of it; and yet it 
is a work of art only on condition of ending with 
that topic, on condition of being written, not from 
it, but to it. If the average modern essay or poem 
were to wear its title at the close, and not at the 
beginning, we wonder in how many cases the reader 



96 7IEWS AND REVIEWS 

would fail to be surprised by it. A book or an 
article is looked upon as a kind of Staubbach water- 
fall, discharging itself into infinite space. 

If we were questioned as to the merit of Mr. 
Arnold's book as a whole, we should say that it 
lay in the fact that the author takes high ground. 
The manner of his Essays is a model of what 
criticisms should be. The foremost English critical 
journal, the Saturday Review, recently disposed of 
a famous writer by saying, in a parenthesis, that he 
had done nothing but write nonsense all his life. 
Mr. Arnold does not pass judgment in parenthesis. 
He is too much of an artist to use leading proposi- 
tions for merely literary purposes. The conse- 
quence is, that he says a few things in such a 
way as that almost in spite of ourselves we remem- 
ber them, instead of a number of things which we 
cannot for the life of us remember. There are 
many things which we wish he had said better. 
It is to be regretted, for instance, that, when Heine 
is for once in a way seriously spoken of, he should 
not be spoken of more as the great poet which he 
is, and which even in New England he will one 
day be admitted to be, than with reference to the 
great moralist which he is not, and which he never 
claimed to be. But here, as in other places, Mr. 
Arnold's excellent spirit reconciles us with his short- 
comings. If he has not spoken of Heine ex- 
haustively, he has at all events spoken of him 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS 97 

seriously, which for an Englishman is a good deal. 
Mr. Arnold's supreme virtue is that he speaks 
of all things seriously, or, in other words, that he 
is not offensively clever. The writers who are will- 
ing to resign themselves to this obscure distinction 
are in our opinion the only writers who under- 
stand their time. That Mr. Arnold thoroughly un- 
derstands his time we do not mean to say, for this 
is the privilege of a very select few; but he is, 
at any rate, profoundly conscious of his time. 
This fact was clearly apparent in his poems, and 
it is even more apparent in these Essays. It gives 
them a peculiar character of melancholy, — that 
melancholy which arises from the spectacle of the 
old-fashioned instinct of enthusiasm in conflict (or 
at all events in contact) with the modern desire to 
be fair, — the melancholy of an age which not only 
has lost its naivete, but which knows it has lost it. 



MR. WALT WHITMAN 



An unsigned review of Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, 
New York, 1865. Originally published in The Nation, 
November 16, 1865. 

As this review has long been familiar to students of 
Whitman, and its authorship quite generally known, the 
original title has been retained here. 



MR. WALT WHITMAN 

IT has been a melancholy task to read this book ; 
and it is a still more melancholy one to write 
abont it. Perhaps since the day of Mr. Tupper's Phi- 
losophy there has been no more difficult reading of 
the poetic sort. It exhibits the effort of an essentially 
prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular 
strain, into poetry. Like hundreds of other good 
patriots, during the last four years, Mr. Walt 
Whitman has imagined that a certain amount of 
violent sympathy with the great deeds and suffer- 
ings of our soldiers, and of admiration for our 
national energy, together with a ready command of 
picturesque language, are sufficient inspiration for 
a poet. If this were the case, we had been a 
nation of poets. The constant developments of 
the war moved us continually to strong feeling 
and to strong expression of it. But in those cases 
in which these expressions were written out and 
printed with all due regard to prosody, they failed 
to make poetry, as any one may see by consulting 
now in cold blood the back volumes of the Re- 
bellion Record. 

101 



102 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

Of course the city of Manhattan, as Mr. Whit- 
man delights to call it, when regiments poured 
through it in the first months of the war, and its own 
sole god, to borrow the words of a real poet, ceased 
for a while to be the millionaire, was a noble spec- 
tacle, and a poetical statement to this effect is pos- 
sible. Of course the tumult of a battle is grand, the 
results of a battle tragic, and the untimely deaths of 
young men a theme for elegies. But he is not a poet 
who merely reiterates these plain facts ore rotundo. 
He only sings them worthily who views them from a 
height. Every tragic event collects about it a 
number of persons who delight to dwell upon its 
superficial points — of minds which are bullied by 
the accidents of the affair. The temper of such 
minds seems to us to be the reverse of the poetic 
temper; for the poet, although he incidentally mas- 
ters, grasps, and uses the superficial traits of his 
theme, is really a poet only in so far as he extracts 
its latent meaning and holds it up to common eyes. 
And yet from such minds most of our war-verses 
have come, and Mr. Whitman's utterances, much 
as the assertion may surprise his friends, are in 
this respect no exception to general fashion. They 
are an exception, however, in that they openly pre- 
tend to be something better; and this it is that 
makes them melancholy reading. 

Mr. Whitman is very fond of blowing his own 
trumpet, and he has made very explicit claims for 



MR. WALT WHITMAN 103 

his books. "Shut not your doors," he exclaims 
at the outset — 

" Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries, 

For that which was lacking among you all, yet needed 
most, I bring; 

A book I have made for your dear sake, soldiers, 

And for you, soul of man, and you, love of com- 
rades ; 

The words of my book nothing, the life of it every- 
thing; 

A book separate, not linked with the rest, nor felt by 
the intellect; 

But you will feel every word, Libertad! arm'd 
Libertad ! 

It shall pass by the intellect to swim the sea, the air, 
With joy with you, soul of man." 

These are great pretensions, but it seems to us 
that the following are even greater: 

" From Paumanok starting, I fly like a bird, 

Around and around to soar, to sing the idea of all; 

To the north betaking myself, to sing there arctic 
songs, 

To Kanada, 'till I absorb Kanada in myself — to 
Michigan then, 

To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs 
(they are inimitable) ; 

Then to Ohio and Indiana, to sing theirs — to Mis- 
souri and Kansas and Arkansas to sing theirs, 

To Tennessee and Kentucky — to the Carolinas and 
Georgia, to sing theirs, 



104 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

To Texas, and so along up toward California, to roam 
accepted everywhere; 

To sing first (to the tap of the war-drum, if need be) 

The idea of all — of the western world, one and in- 
separable, 

And then the song of each member of these States." 

Mr. Whitman's primary purpose is to celebrate 
the greatness of our armies ; his secondary purpose 
is to celebrate the greatness of the city of New 
York. He pursues these objects through a hun- 
dred pages of matter which remind us irresistibly 
of the story of the college professor who, on a 
venturesome youth bringing him a theme done in 
blank verse, reminded him that it was not cus- 
tomary in writing prose to begin each line with 
a capital. The frequent capitals are the only marks 
of verse in Mr. Whitman's writings. There is, 
fortunately, but one attempt at rhyme. We say 
fortunately, for if the inequality of Mr. Whit- 
man's lines were self-registering, as it would be in 
the case of an anticipated syllable at their close, 
the effect would be painful in the extreme. As 
the case stands, each line stands off by itself, in 
resolute independence of its companions, without 
a visible goal. 

But if Mr. Whitman does not write verse, he 
does not write ordinary prose. The reader has 
seen that liberty is "libertad." In like manner, 
comrade is "camerado"; Americans are "Ameri- 



MB. WALT WHITMAN 105 

canos"; a pavement is a "trottoir," and Mr. 
Whitman himself is a "chansonnier." If there 
is one thing that Mr. Whitman is not, it is this, 
for Beranger was a chansonnier. To appreciate the 
force of our conjunction, the reader should com- 
pare his military lyrics with Mr. Whitman's 
declamations. Our author's novelty, however, is 
not in his words, but in the form of his writing. 
As we have said, it begins for all the world like 
verse and turns out to be arrant prose. It is 
more like Mr. Tupper's proverbs than anything 
we have met. 

But what if, in form, it is prose ? it may be asked. 
Very good poetry has come out of prose before 
this. To this we would reply that it must first 
have gone into it. Prose, in order to be good 
poetry, must first be good prose. As a general 
principle, we know of no circumstance more likely 
to impugn a writer's earnestness than the adoption 
of an anomalous style. He must have something 
very original to say if none of the old vehicles 
will carry his thoughts. Of course he may be sur- 
prisingly original. Still, presumption is against 
him. If on examination the matter of his discourse 
proves very valuable, it justifies, or at any rate 
excuses, his literary innovation. 

But if, on the other hand, it is of a common 
quality, with nothing new about it but its man- 
ners, the public will judge the writer harshly. The 



106 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

most that can be said of Mr. Whitman's vaticina- 
tions is, that, cast in a fluent and familiar manner, 
the average substance of them might escape un- 
challenged. But we have seen that Mr. Whitman 
prides himself especially on the substance — the life 
— of his poetry. It may be rough, it may be 
grim, it may be clumsy — such we take to be the 
author's argument — but it is sincere, it is sublime, 
it appeals to the soul of man, it is the voice of a 
people. He tells us, in the lines quoted, that the 
words of his book are nothing. To our perception 
they are everything, and very little at that. 

A great deal of verse that is nothing but words 
has, during the war, been sympathetically sighed 
over and cut out of newspaper corners, because it 
has possessed a certain simple melody. But Mr. 
Whitman's verse, we are confident, would have 
failed even of this triumph, for the simple reason 
that no triumph, however small, is won but through 
the exercise of art, and that this volume is an 
offence, against art. It is not enough to be grim 
and rough and careless ; common sense is also neces- 
sary, for it is by common sense that we are judged. 
There exists in even the commonest minds, in 
literary matters, a certain precise instinct of con- 
servatism, which is very shrewd in detecting wanton 
eccentricities. 

To this instinct Mr. Whitman's attitude seems 
monstrous. It is monstrous because it pretends 



MR. WALT WHITMAN 107 

to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; 
because it pretends to gratify the feelings while 
it outrages the taste. The point is that it does 
this on theory, wilfully, consciously, arrogantly. 
It is the little nursery game of "open your mouth 
and shut your eyes. ' ' Our hearts are often touched 
through a compromise with the artistic sense, but 
never in direct violation of it. Mr. Whitman sits 
down at the outset and counts out the intelli- 
gence. This were indeed a wise precaution on his 
part if the intelligence were only submissive ! But 
when she is deliberately insulted, she takes her 
revenge by simply standing erect and open-eyed. 
This is assuredly the best she can do. And if she 
could find a voice she would probably address Mr. 
Whitman as follows: — 

"You came to woo my sister, the human soul. 
Instead of giving me a kick as you approach, you 
should either greet me courteously, or, at least, 
steal in unobserved. But now you have me on 
your hands. Your chances are poor. What the 
human heart desires above all is sincerity, and you 
do not appear to me sincere. For a lover you talk 
entirely too much about yourself. In one place you 
threaten to absorb Kanada. In another you call 
upon the city of New York to incarnate you, as 
you have incarnated it. In another you inform us 
that neither youth pertains to you nor 'delicatesse,' 
that you are awkward in the parlour, that you do 



108 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

not dance, and that you have neither bearing, 
beauty, knowledge, nor fortune. In another place, 
by an allusion to your 'little songs,' you seem to 
identify yourself with the third person of the 
Trinity. 

"For a poet who claims to sing 'the idea of all/ 
this is tolerably egotistical. We look in vain, how- 
ever, through your book for a single idea. We 
find nothing but flashy imitations of ideas. We 
find a medley of extravagances and commonplaces. 
We find art, measure, grace, sense sneered at on 
every page, and nothing positive given us in their 
stead. To be positive one must have something to 
say ; to be positive requires reason, labour, and art ; 
and art requires, above all things, a suppression of 
one's self, a subordination of one's self to an idea. 
This will never do for you, whose plan is to adapt 
the scheme of the universe to your own limitations. 
You cannot entertain and exhibit ideas ; but, as we 
have seen, you are prepared to incarnate them. 
It is for this reason, doubtless, that when once you 
have planted yourself squarely before the public, 
and in view of the great service you have done to 
the ideal, have become, as you say, ' accepted every- 
where,' you can afford to deal exclusively in 
words. What would be bald nonsense and dreary 
platitudes in any one else becomes sublimity in you. 

"But all this is a mistake. To become adopted 
as a national poet, it is not enough to discard 



MB. WALT WHITMAN 109 

everything in particular and to accept everything 
in general, to amass crudity upon crudity, to dis- 
charge the undigested contents of your blotting- 
book into the lap of the public. You must respect 
the public which you address; for it has taste, if 
you have not. It delights in the grand, the heroic, 
and the masculine ; but it delights to see these con- 
ceptions cast into worthy form. It is indifferent 
to brute sublimity. It will never do for you to 
thrust your hands into your pockets and cry out 
that, as the research of form is an intolerable bore, 
the shortest and most economical way for the pub- 
lic to embrace its idols — for the nation to realise its 
genius — is in your own person. 

"This democratic, liberty-loving, American pop- 
ulace, this stern and war-tried people, is a great 
civiliser. It is devoted to refinement. If it has 
sustained a monstrous war, and practised human 
nature's best in so many ways for the last five 
years, it is not to put up with spurious poetry 
afterwards. To sing aright our battles and our 
glories it is not enough to have served in a hospital 
(however praiseworthy the task in itself), to be 
aggressively careless, inelegant, and ignorant, and 
to be constantly preoccupied with yourself. It is 
not enough to be rude, lugubrious, and grim. You 
must also be serious. You must forget yourself in 
your ideas. Your personal qualities — the vigour 
of your temperament, the manly independence of 



110 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

your nature, the tenderness of your heart — these 
facts are impertinent. You must be possessed, and 
you must thrive to possess your possession. If in 
your striving you break into divine eloquence, then 
you are a poet. If the idea which possesses you is 
the idea of your country's greatness, then you are 
a national poet ; and not otherwise. ' ' 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 



I. A review of The Spanish Gypsy. A Poem. By George 
Eliot. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1868. Originally 
published in North American Review, October, 1868. 

II. A review of The Legend of Jubal, and other Poems. 
By George Eliot. Wm. Blackwood and Sons: Edinburgh 
and London. 1874. Originally published in North Amer- 
ican Review, October, 1874. 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 

I. THE SPANISH GYPSY 

I KNOW not whether George Eliot has any 
enemies, nor why she should have any; but 
if perchance she has, I can imagine them to have 
hailed the announcement of a poem from her pen 
as a piece of particularly good news. "Now, 
finally/ ' I fancy them saying, "this sadly over- 
rated author will exhibit all the weakness that is 
in her; now she will prove herself what we have 
all along affirmed her to be — not a serene, self- 
directing genius of the first order, knowing her 
powers and respecting them, and content to leave 
well enough alone, but a mere showy rhetorician, 
possessed and prompted, not by the humble spirit 
of truth, but by an insatiable longing for ap- 
plause. ' ' Suppose Mr. Tennyson were to come out 
with a novel, or Madame George Sand were to pro- 
duce a tragedy in French alexandrines. The 
reader will agree with me, that these are hard sup- 
positions; yet the world has seen stranger things, 
and been reconciled to them. Nevertheless, with 
the best possible will toward our illustrious novel- 
ist, it is easy to put ourselves in the shoes of these 
113 



114 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

hypothetical detractors. No one, assuredly, but 
George Eliot could mar George Eliot's reputation; 
but there was room for the fear that she might do 
it. This reputation was essentially prose-built, and 
in the attempt to insert a figment of verse of the 
magnitude of The Spanish Gypsy, it was quite pos- 
sible that she might injure its fair proportions. 

In consulting her past works, for approval of 
their hopes and their fears, I think both her friends 
and her foes would have found sufficient ground 
for their arguments. Of all our English prose- 
writers of the present day, I think I may say, that, 
as a writer simply, a mistress of style, I have been 
very near preferring the author of Silas Maimer 
and of Romola, — the author, too, of Felix Holt. 
The motive of my great regard for her style I 
take to have been that I fancied it such perfect 
solid prose. Brilliant and lax as it was in tissue, 
it seemed to contain very few of the silken threads 
of poetry; it lay on the ground like a carpet, in- 
stead of floating in the air like a banner. If my 
impression was correct, The Spanish Gypsy is not 
a genuine poem. And yet, looking over the au- 
thor's novels in memory, looking them over in the 
light of her unexpected assumption of the poetical 
function, I find it hard at times not to mistrust 
my impression. I like George Eliot well enough, 
in fact, to admit, for the time, that I might have 
been in the wrong. If I had liked her less, if I 



TEE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 115 

had rated lower the quality of her prose, I should 
have estimated coldly the possibilities of her verse. 
Of course, therefore, if, as I am told many persons 
do in England, who consider carpenters and 
weavers and millers' daughters no legitimate sub- 
ject for reputable fiction, I had denied her novels 
any qualities at all, I should have made haste, on 
reading the announcement of her poem, to speak 
of her as the world speaks of a lady, who, having 
reached a comfortable middle age, with her shoul- 
ders decently covered, ''for reasons deep below the 
reach of thought," (to quote our author), begins 
to go out to dinner in a low-necked dress "of the 
period," and say in fine, in three words, that she 
was going to make a fool of herself. 

But here, meanwhile, is the book before me, to 
arrest all this a priori argumentation. Time 
enough has elapsed since its appearance for most 
readers to have uttered their opinions, and for 
the general verdict of criticism to have been 
formed. In looking over several of the published 
reviews, I am struck with the fact that those imme- 
diately issued are full of the warmest delight and 
approval, and that, as the work ceases to be a nov- 
elty, objections, exceptions, and protests multiply. 
This is quite logical. Not only does it take a much 
longer time than the reviewer on a weekly journal 
has at his command to properly appreciate a work 
of the importance of The Spanish Gypsy, but the 



116 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

poem was actually much more of a poem than was 
to be expected. The foremost feeling of many 
readers must have been — it was certainly my own 
— that we had hitherto only half known George 
Eliot. Adding this dazzling new half to the old 
one, readers constructed for the moment a really 
splendid literary figure. But gradually the old 
half began to absorb the new, and to assimilate 
its virtues and failings, and critics finally remem- 
bered that the cleverest writer in the world is after 
all nothing and no one but himself. 

The most striking quality in The Spanish Gypsy, 
on a first reading, I think, is its extraordinary 
rhetorical energy and elegance. The richness of 
the author's style in her novels gives but an inade- 
quate idea of the splendid generosity of diction 
displayed in the poem. She is so much of a thinker 
and an observer that she draws very heavily on her 
powers of expression, and one may certainly say 
that they not only never fail her, but that verbal 
utterance almost always bestows upon her ideas a 
peculiar beauty and fullness, apart from their sig- 
nificance. The result produced in this manner, 
the reader will see, may come very near being 
poetry; it is assuredly eloquence. The faults in 
the present work are very seldom faults of weak- 
ness, except in so far as it is weak to lack an abso- 
lute mastery of one's powers; they arise rather 
from an excess of rhetorical energy, from a desire 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 117 

to attain to perfect fullness and roundness of utter- 
ance; they are faults of overstatement. It is by 
no means uncommon to find a really fine passage 
injured by the addition of a clause which dilutes 
the idea under pretence of completing it. The 
poem opens, for instance, with a description of 

"Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love 
(A calm earth-goddess crowned with corn and vines) 
On the Mid Sea that moans with memories, 
And on the untravelled Ocean, whose vast tides 
Pant dumbly passionate with dreams of youth." 

The second half of the fourth line and the fifth, 
here, seem to me as poor as the others are good. 
So in the midst of the admirable description of 
Don Silva, which precedes the first scene in the 
castle : — 

" A spirit framed 
Too proudly special for obedience, 
Too subtly pondering for mastery: 
Born of a goddess with a mortal sire, 
Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity, 
Boom-gifted with long resonant consciousness 
And perilous heightening of the sentient soul." 

The transition to the lines in Italic is like the pas- 
sage from a well-ventilated room into a vacuum. 
On reflection, we see ' ' long resonant consciousness ' ' 
to be a very good term; but, as it stands, it cer- 
tainly lacks breathing-space. On the other hand, 



118 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

there are more than enough passages of the char- 
acter of the following to support what I have said 
of the genuine splendour of the style : — 

" I was right ! 
These gems have life in them: their colours speak, 
Say what words fail of. So do many things, — 
The scent of jasmine and the fountain's plash, 
The moving shadows on the far-off hills, 
The slanting moonlight and our clasping hands. 

Silva, there's an ocean round our words, 
That overflows and drowns them. Do you know. 
Sometimes when we sit silent, and the air 
Breathes gently on us from the orange-trees, 

It seems that with the whisper of a word 

Our souls must shrink, get poorer, more apart? 

Is it not true? 

DON SILVA. 

Yes, dearest, it is true. 
Speech is but broken light upon the depth 
Of the unspoken : even your loved words 
Float in the larger meaning of your voice 
As something dimmer." 

1 may say in general, that the author's admirers 
must have found in The Spanish Gypsy a present- 
ment of her various special gifts stronger and 
fuller, on the whole, than any to be found in her 
novels. Those who valued her chiefly for her 
humour — the gentle humour which provokes a 



TEE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 119 

smile, but deprecates a laugh — will recognise that 
delightful gift in Blasco, and Lorenzo, and Roldan, 
and Juan, — slighter in quantity than in her prose- 
writings, but quite equal, I think, in quality. 
Those who prize most her descriptive powers will 
see them wondrously well embodied in these pages. 
As for those who have felt compelled to declare 
that she possesses the Shakespearian touch, they 
must consent, with what grace they may, to be dis- 
appointed. I have never thought our author a 
great dramatist, nor even a particularly dramatic 
writer. A real dramatist, I imagine, could never 
have reconciled himself to the odd mixture of the 
narrative and dramatic forms by which the present 
work is distinguished; and that George Eliot's 
genius should have needed to work under these 
conditions seems to me strong evidence of the par- 
tial and incomplete character of her dramatic in- 
stincts. An English critic lately described her, 
with much correctness, as a critic rather than a 
creator of characters. She puts her figures into 
action very successfully, but on the whole she thinks 
for them more than they think for themselves. 
She thinks, however, to wonderfully good purpose. 
In none of her works are there two more distinctly 
human representations than the characters of Silva 
and Juan. The latter, indeed, if I am not mis- 
taken, ranks with Tito Melema and Hetty Sorrel, 
as one of her very best conceptions. 



120 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

What is commonly called George Eliot's humour 
consists largely, I think, in a certain tendency to 
epigram and compactness of utterance, — not the 
short-clipped, biting, ironical epigram, but a form 
of statement in which a liberal dose of truth is 
embraced in terms none the less comprehensive for 
being very firm and vivid. !Juan says of Zarca 
that 

" He is one of those 

Who steal the keys from snoring Destiny, 

And make the prophets lie." 

Zarca himself, speaking of "the steadfast mind, 
the undivided will to seek the good," says most 
admirably, — 

"'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings 
A human music from the indifferent air." 

When the Prior pronounces Fedalma's blood 
"unchristian as the leopard's/' Don Silva retorts 
with, — 

"Unchristian as the Blessed Virgin's blood, 
Before the angel spoke the word, ' All hail ! ' " 

Zarca qualifies his daughter's wish to maintain 
her faith to her lover, at the same time that she 
embraces her father's fortunes, as 

" A woman's dream, — who thinks by smiling well 
To ripen figs in frost." 



TEE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 121 

This happy brevity of expression is frequently 
revealed in those rich descriptive passages and 
touches in which the work abounds. Some of the 
lines taken singly are excellent: — 

" And bells make Catholic the trembling air " ; 
and, 

" Sad as the twilight, all his clothes ill-girt " ; 

and again 

"Mournful professor of high drollery." 

Here is a very good line and a half : — 

" The old rain-fretted mountains in their robes 
Of shadow-broken gray." 

Here, finally, are three admirable pictures: — 

" The stars thin-scattered made the heavens large, 
Bending in slow procession; in the east, 
Emergent from the dark waves of the hills, 
Seeming a little sister of the moon, 
Glowed Venus all unquenched." 

" Spring afternoons, when delicate shadows fall 
Pencilled upon the grass; high summer morns, 

" When white light rains upon the quiet sea, 
And cornfields flush for ripeness." 

11 Scent the fresh breath of the height-loving herbs, 
That, trodden by the pretty parted hoofs 



122 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

Of nimble goats, sigh at the innocent bruise, 
And with a mingled difference exquisite 
Pour a sweet burden on the buoyant air." 

But now to reach the real substance of the poem, 
and to allow the reader to appreciate the author's 
treatment of human character and passion, I must 
speak briefly of the story. I shall hardly misrep- 
resent it, when I say that it is a very old one, and 
that it illustrates that very common occurrence in 
human affairs, — the conflict of love and duty. 
Such, at least, is the general impression made by 
the poem as it stands. It is very possible that the 
author's primary intention may have had a breadth 
which has been curtailed in the execution of the 
work, — that it was her wish to present a struggle 
between nature and culture, between education and 
the instinct of race. You can detect in such a 
theme the stuff of a very good drama, — a some- 
what stouter stuff, however, than The Spanish 
Gypsy is made of. George Eliot, true to that di- 
dactic tendency for which she has hitherto been re- 
markable, has preferred to make her heroine's pre- 
dicament a problem in morals, and has thereby, I 
think, given herself hard work to reach a satisfac- 
tory solution. She has, indeed, committed herself 
to a signal error, in a psychological sense, — that 
of making a Gypsy girl with a conscience. Either 
Fedalma was a perfect Zincala in temper and in- 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 123 

stinct, — in which case her adhesion to her father 
and her race was a blind, passionate, sensuous 
movement, which is almost expressly contradicted, 
— or else she was a pure and intelligent Catholic, 
in which case nothing in the nature of a struggle 
can be predicated. The character of Fedalma, I 
may say, comes very near being a failure, — a very 
beautiful one ; but in point of fact it misses it. 

It misses it, I think, thanks to that circumstance 
which in reading and criticising The Spanish 
Gypsy we must not cease to bear in mind, the fact 
that the work is emphatically a romance. We may 
contest its being a poem, but we must admit that 
it is a romance in the fullest sense of the word. 
Whether the term may be absolutely denned I know 
not; but we may say of it, comparing it with the 
novel, that it carries much farther that compromise 
with reality which is the basis of all imaginative 
writing. In the romance this principle of compro- 
mise pervades the superstructure as well as the 
basis. The most that we exact is that the fable be 
consistent with itself. Fedalma is not a real 
Gypsy maiden. The conviction is strong in the 
reader's mind that' a genuine Spanish Zincala 
would have somehow contrived both to follow her 
tribe and to keep her lover. If Fedalma is not 
real, Zarca is even less so. He is interesting, im- 
posing, picturesque; but he is very far, I take it, 
from being a genuine Gypsy chieftain. They are 



124 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

both ideal figures, — the offspring of a strong men- 
tal desire for creatures well rounded in their ele- 
vation and heroism, — creatures who should illus- 
trate the nobleness of human nature divorced from 
its smallness. Don Silva has decidedly more of 
the common stuff of human feeling, more charm- 
ing natural passion and weakness. But he, too, 
is largely a vision of the intellect ; his constitution 
is adapted to the atmosphere and the climate of ro- 
mance. Juan, indeed, has one foot well planted on 
the lower earth ; but Juan is only an accessory fig- 
ure. I have said enough to lead the reader to per- 
ceive that the poem should not be regarded as a 
rigid transcript of actual or possible fact, — that 
the action goes on in an artificial world, and that 
properly to comprehend it he must regard it with a 
generous mind. 

Viewed in this manner, as efficient figures in an 
essentially ideal and romantic drama, Fedalma and 
Zarca seem to gain vastly, and to shine with a bril- 
liant radiance. If we reduce Fedalma to the level 
of the heroines of our modern novels, in which the 
interest aroused by a young girl is in proportion to 
the similarity of her circumstances to those of the 
reader, and in which none but the commonest feel- 
ings are required, provided they be expressed with 
energy, we shall be tempted to call her a solemn 
and cold-blooded jilt. In a novel it would have 
been next to impossible for the author to make the 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 125 

heroine renounce her lover. In novels we not only 
forgive that weakness which is common and fa- 
miliar and human, but we actually demand it. 
But in poetry, although we are compelled to ad- 
here to the few elementary passions of our nature, 
we do our best to dress them in a new and ex- 
quisite garb. Men and women in a poetical drama 
are nothing, if not distinguished. 

u Our dear young love, — its breath was happiness ! 
But it had grown upon a larger life, 
Which tore its roots asunder." 

These words are uttered by Fedalma at the close 
of the poem, and in them she emphatically claims 
the distinction of having her own private interests 
invaded by those of a people. The manner of her 
kinship with the Zincali is in fact a very much 
"larger life" than her marriage with Don Silva. 
We may, indeed, challenge the probability of her 
relationship to her tribe impressing her mind with 
a force equal to that of her love, — her "dear young 
love." We may declare that this is an unnatural 
and violent result. For my part, I think it is very 
far from violent; I think the author has employed 
her art in reducing the apparently arbitrary qual- 
ity of her preference for her tribe. I say reduc- 
ing; I do not say effacing; because it seems to me, 
as I have intimated, that just at this point her 
art has been wanting, and we are not sufficiently 



126 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

prepared for Fedalma's movement by a sense of 
her Gypsy temper and instincts. Still, we are in 
some degree prepared for it by various passages 
in the opening scenes of the book, — by all the mag- 
nificent description of her dance in the Plaza : — 

"All gathering influences culminate 
And urge Fedalma. Earth and heaven seem one, 
Life a glad trembling on the outer edge 
Of unknown rapture. Swifter now she moves, 
Filling the measure with a double beat 
And widening circle; now she seems to glow 
With more declared presence, glorified. 
Circling, she lightly bends, and lifts on high 
The multitudinous-sounding tambourine, 
And makes it ring and boom, then lifts it higher, 
Stretching her left arm beauteous." 

We are better prepared for it, however, than by 
anything else, by the whole impression we receive 
of the exquisite refinement and elevation of the 
young girl's mind, — by all that makes her so bad 
a Gypsy. She possesses evidently a very high- 
strung intellect, and her whole conduct is in a 
higher key, as I may say, than that of ordinary 
women, or even ordinary heroines. She is natural, 
I think, in a poetical sense. She is consistent with 
her own prodigiously superfine character. From 
a lower point of view than that of the author, she 
lacks several of the desirable feminine qualities, — 
a certain womanly warmth and petulance, a grace- 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 127 

ful irrationality. Her mind is very much too lu- 
cid, and her aspirations too lofty. Her conscience, 
especially, is decidedly over-active. But this is a 
distinction which she shares with all the author's 
heroines, — Dinah Morris, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, 
and Esther Lyon, — a distinction, moreover, for 
which I should be very sorry to hold George Eliot 
to account. There are most assuredly women and 
women. While Messrs. Charles Reade and Wilkie 
Collins, and Miss Braddon and her school, tell one 
half the story, it is no more than fair that the au- 
thor of The Spanish Gypsy should, all unassisted, 
attempt to relate the other. 

Whenever a story really interests one, he is very 
fond of paying it the compliment of imagining it 
otherwise constructed, and of capping it with a 
different termination. In the present case, one is 
irresistibly tempted to fancy The Spanish Gypsy 
in prose, — a compact, regular drama: not in 
George Eliot's prose, however: in a diction much 
more nervous and heated and rapid, written with 
short speeches as well as long. (The reader will 
have observed the want of brevity, retort, inter- 
ruption, rapid alternation, in the dialogue of the 
poem. The characters all talk, as it were, stand- 
ing still.) In such a play as the one indicated one 
imagines a truly dramatic Fedalma, — a passionate, 
sensuous, irrational Bohemian, as elegant as good 
breeding and native good taste could make her, 



128 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

and as pure as her actual sister in the poem, — but 
rushing into her father's arms with a cry of joy, 
and losing the sense of her lover's sorrow in what 
the author has elsewhere described as "the hur- 
rying ardour of action." Or in the way of a dif- 
ferent termination, suppose that Fedalma should 
for the time value at once her own love and her 
lover's enough to make her prefer the latter 's des- 
tiny to that represented by her father. Imagine, 
then, that, after marriage, the Gypsy blood and 
nature should begin to flow and throb in quicker 
pulsations, — and that the poor girl should sadly 
contrast the sunny freedom and lawless joy of her 
people's lot with the splendid rigidity and formal- 
ism of her own. You may conceive at this point 
that she should pass from sadness to despair, and 
from despair to revolt. Here the catastrophe may 
occur in a dozen different ways. Fedalma may die 
before her husband's eyes, of unsatisfied longing 
for the fate she has rejected ; or she may make an 
attempt actually to recover her fate, by wandering 
off and seeking out her people. The cultivated 
mind, however, it seems to me, imperiously de- 
mands, that, on finally overtaking them, she shall 
die of mingled weariness and shame, as neither a 
good Gypsy nor a good Christian, but simply a 
good figure for a tragedy. But there is a degree 
of levity which almost amounts to irreverence in 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 129 

fancying this admirable performance as anything 
other than it is. 

After Fedalma comes Zarca, and here our imagi- 
nation flags. Not so George Eliot's: for as simple 
imagination, I think that in the conception of this 
impressive and unreal figure it appears decidedly 
at its strongest. With Zarca, we stand at the very 
heart of the realm of romance. There is a truly 
grand simplicity, to my mind, in the outline of his 
character, and a remarkable air of majesty in his 
poise and attitude. He is a pere noble in perfec- 
tion. His speeches have an exquisite eloquence. 
In strictness, he is to the last degree unreal, il- 
logical, and rhetorical ; but a certain dramatic unity 
is diffused through his character by the depth and 
energy of the colours in which he is painted. With 
a little less simplicity, his figure would be decidedly 
modern. As it stands, it is neither modern nor 
mediaeval; it belongs to the world of intellectual 
dreams and visions. The reader will admit that it 
is a vision of no small beauty, the conception of a 
stalwart chieftain who distils the cold exaltation of 
his purpose from the utter loneliness and obloquy 
of his race : — 

" Wanderers whom no God took knowledge of, 
To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight 
Another race to make them ampler room; 
A people with no home even in memory, 



130 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

No dimmest lore of giant ancestors 

To make a common hearth for piety"; 

a people all ignorant of 

u The rich heritage, the milder life, 
Of nations fathered by a mighty Past." 

Like Don Silva, like Juan, like Sephardo, Zarca 
is decidedly a man of intellect. 

Better than Fedalma or than Zarca is the re- 
markably beautiful and elaborate portrait of Don 
Silva, in whom the author has wished to present a 
young nobleman as splendid in person and in soul 
as the dawning splendour of his native country. 
In the composition of his figure, the real and the 
romantic, brilliancy and pathos, are equally com- 
mingled. He cannot be said to stand out in vivid 
relief. As a piece of painting, there is nothing 
commanding, aggressive, brutal, as I may say, in 
his lineaments. But they will bear close scrutiny. 
Place yourself within the circumscription of the 
work, breathe its atmosphere, and you will see that 
Don Silva is portrayed with a delicacy to which 
English story-tellers, whether in prose or verse, have 
not accustomed us. There are better portraits in 
Browning, but there are also worse; in Tennyson 
there are none as good; and in the other great 
poets of the present century there are no attempts, 
that I can remember, to which we may compare it. 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 131 

In spite of the poem being called in honour of his 
mistress, Don Silva is in fact the central figure in 
the work. Much more than Fedalma, he is the 
passive object of the converging blows of Fate. 
The young girl, after all, did what was easiest; but 
he is entangled in a network of agony, without 
choice or compliance of his own. It is an admi- 
rable subject admirably treated. I may describe it 
by saying that it exhibits a perfect aristocratic na- 
ture (born and bred at a time when democratic 
aspirations were quite irrelevant to happiness), 
dragged down by no fault of its own into the vul- 
gar mire of error and expiation. The interest 
which attaches to Don Silva 's character revolves 
about its exquisite human weakness, its manly scep- 
ticism, its antipathy to the trenchant, the absolute, 
and arbitrary. At the opening of the book, the au- 
thor rehearses his various titles: — 

u Such titles with their blazonry are his 
Who keeps this fortress, sworn Alcayde, 
Lord of the valley, master of the town, 
Commanding whom he will, himself commanded 
By Christ his Lord, who sees him from the cross, 
And from bright heaven where the Mother pleads; 
By good Saint James, upon the milk-white steed, 
Who leaves his bliss to fight for chosen Spain ; 
By the dead gaze of all his ancestors; 
And by the mystery of his Spanish blood, 
Charged with the awe and glories of the past." 



132 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

Throughout the poem, we are conscious, during the 
evolution of his character, of the presence of these 
high mystical influences, which, combined with his 
personal pride, his knightly temper, his delicate 
culture, form a splendid background for passionate 
dramatic action. The finest pages in the book, to 
my taste, are those which describe his lonely vigil 
in the Gypsy camp, after he has failed in winning 
back Fedalma, and has pledged his faith to Zarca. 
Placed under guard, and left to his own stern 
thoughts, his soul begins to react against the hide- 
ous disorder to which he has committed it, to pro- 
claim its kinship with "customs and bonds and 
laws," and its sacred need of the light of human 
esteem : — 

u Now awful Night, 
Ancestral mystery of mysteries, came down 
Past all the generations of the stars, 
And visited his soul with touch more close 
Than when he kept that closer, briefer watch, 
Under the church's roof, beside his arms, 
And won his knighthood." 

To be appreciated at their worth, these pages 
should be attentively read. Nowhere has the au- 
thor's marvellous power of expression, the mingled 
dignity and pliancy of her style, obtained a greater 
triumph. She has reproduced the expression of a 
mind with the same vigorous distinctness as that 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 133 

with which a great painter represents the expres- 
sion of a countenance. 

The character which accords best with my own 
taste is that of the minstrel Juan, an extremely 
generous conception. He fills no great part in the 
drama ; he is by nature the reverse of a man of ac- 
tion; and, strictly, the story could very well dis- 
pense with him. Yet, for all that, I should be 
sorry to lose him, and lose thereby the various ex- 
cellent things which are said of him and by him. I 
do not include his songs among the latter. Only 
two of the lyrics in the work strike me as good : the 
song of Pablo, "The world is great: the birds all 
fly from me"; and, in a lower degree, the chant of 
the Zincali, in the fourth book. But I do include 
the words by which he is introduced to the reader : 

" Juan was a troubadour revived, 
Freshening life's dusty road with babbling rills 
Of wit and song, living 'mid harnessed men 
With limbs ungalled by armour, ready so 
To soothe them weary and to cheer them sad. 
Guest at the board, companion in the camp, 
A crystal mirror to the life around : 
Flashing the comment keen of simple fact 
Defined in words; lending brief lyric voice 
To grief and sadness; hardly taking note 
Of difference betwixt his own and others'; 
But, rather singing as a listener 



134 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

To the deep moans, the cries, the wildstrong joys 
Of universal Nature, old, yet young." 

When Juan talks at his ease, he strikes the note 
of poetry much more surely than when he lifts his 
voice in song: — 

" Yet if your graciousness will not disdain 
A poor plucked songster, shall he sing to you? 
Some lay of afternoons, — some ballad strain 
Of those who ached once, but are sleeping now 
Under the sun-warmed flowers?" 

Juan's link of connection with the story is, in 
the first place, that he is in love with Fedalma, and, 
in the second, as a piece of local colour. His atti- 
tude with regard to Fedalma is indicated with 
beautiful delicacy: — 

" O lady, constancy has kind and rank. 
One man's is lordly, plump, and bravely clad, 
Holds its head high, and tells the world its name : 
Another man's is beggared, must go bare, 
And shiver through the world, the jest of all, 
But that it puts the motley on, and plays 
Itself the jester." 

Nor are his merits lost upon her, as she declares, 
with no small force, — 

"No! on the close-thronged spaces of the earth 
A battle rages; Fate has carried me 
'Mid the thick arrows : I will keep my stand, — 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 135 

Nor shrink, and let the shaft pass by my breast 
To pierce another. 0, 't is written large, 
The thing I have to do. But you, dear Juan, 
Renounce, endure, are brave, unurged by aught 
Save the sweet overflow of your good-will." 

In every human imbroglio, be it of a comic or a 
tragic nature, it is good to think of an observer 
standing aloof, the critic, the idle commentator of 
it all, taking notes, as we may say, in the interest 
of truth. The exercise of this function is the chief 
ground of our interest in Juan. Yet as a man of 
action, too, he once appeals most irresistibly to our 
sympathies: I mean in the admirable scene with 
Hinda, in which he wins back his stolen finery by 
his lute-playing. This scene, which is written in 
prose, has a simple realistic power which renders 
it a truly remarkable composition. 

Of the different parts of The Spanish Gypsy I 
have spoken with such fullness as my space allows : 
it remains to add a few remarks upon the work as 
a whole. Its great fault is simply that it is not a 
genuine poem. It lacks the hurrying quickness, 
the palpitating warmth, the bursting melody of 
such a creation. A genuine poem is a tree that 
breaks into blossom and shakes in the wind. 
George Eliot's elaborate composition is like a vast 
mural design in mosaic-work, where great slabs and 
delicate morsels of stone are laid together with won- 
derful art, where there are plenty of noble lines 



136 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

and generous hues, but where everything is rigid, 
measured, and cold, — nothing dazzling, magical, 
and vocal. The poem contains a number of faulty- 
lines, — lines of twelve, of eleven, and of eight syl- 
lables, — of which it is easy to suppose that a more 
sacredly commissioned versifier would not have 
been guilty. Occasionally, in the search for poetic 
effect, the author decidedly misses her way: — 

" All her being paused 
In resolution, as some leonine wave/' etc. 

A "leonine" wave is rather to much of a lion and 
too little of a wave. The work possesses imagina- 
tion, I think, in no small measure. The descrip- 
tion of Silva's feelings during his sojourn in the 
Gypsy camp is strongly pervaded by it; or if per- 
chance the author achieved these passages without 
rising on the wings of fancy, her glory is all the 
greater. But the poem is wanting in passion. 
The reader is annoyed by a perpetual sense of effort 
and of intellectual tension. It is a characteristic 
of George Eliot, I imagine, to allow her impressions 
to linger a long time in her mind, so that by the 
time they are ready for use they have lost much of 
their original freshness and vigour. They have ac- 
quired, of course, a number of artificial charms, 
but they have parted with their primal natural 
simplicity. In this poem we see the landscape, the 
people, the manners of Spain as through a glass 



TEE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 137 

smoked by the flame of meditative vigils, just as 
we saw the outward aspect of Florence in Romola. 
The brightness of colouring is there, the artful 
chiaroscuro, and all the consecrated properties of 
the scene; but they gleam in an artificial light. 
The background of the action is admirable in spots, 
but is cold and mechanical as a whole. The im- 
mense rhetorical ingenuity and elegance of the 
work, which constitute its main distinction, inter- 
fere with the faithful, uncompromising reflection 
of the primary elements of the subject. 

The great merit of the characters is that they are 
marvellously well understood, — far better under- 
stood than in the ordinary picturesque romance of 
action, adventure, and mystery. And yet they are 
not understood to the bottom ; they retain an inde- 
finably factitious air, which is not sufficiently jus- 
tified by their position as ideal figures. The reader 
who has attentively read the closing scene of the 
poem will know what I mean. The scene shows re- 
markable talent ; it is eloquent, it is beautiful ; but 
it is arbitrary and fanciful, more than unreal, — un- 
true. The reader silently chafes and protests, and 
finally breaks forth and cries, ' ' for a blast from 
the outer world!" Silva and Fedalma have de- 
veloped themselves so daintily and elaborately 
within the close-sealed precincts of the author's 
mind, that they strike us at last as acting not as 
simple human creatures, but as downright amateurs 



138 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

of the morally graceful and picturesque. To say- 
that this is the ultimate impression of the poem is 
to say that it is not a great work. It is in fact not 
a great drama. It is, in the first place, an admi- 
rable study of character, — an essay, as they say, to- 
ward the solution of a given problem in conduct. 
In the second, it is a noble literary performance. 
It can be read neither without interest in the for- 
mer respect, nor without profit for its signal merits 
of style, — and this in spite of the fact that the 
versification is, as the French say, as little reussi as 
was to be expected in a writer beginning at a bound 
with a kind of verse which is very much more diffi- 
cult than even the best prose, — the author's own 
prose. I shall indicate most of its merits and de- 
fects, great and small, if I say it is a romance, — a 
romance written by one who is emphatically a 
thinker. 



n. THE LEGEND OF JUBAL AND OTHER POEMS 

When the author of Middlemarch published, 
some years since, her first volume of verse, the 
reader, in trying to judge it fairly, asked him- 
self what he should think of it if she had never 
published a line of prose. The question, perhaps, 
was not altogether a help to strict fairness of judg- 
ment, but the author was protected from illiberal 
conclusions by the fact that, practically, it was im- 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 139 

possible to answer it. George Eliot belongs to that 
class of pre-eminent writers in relation to whom the 
imagination comes to self -consciousness only to find 
itself in subjection. It was impossible to disen- 
gage one's judgment from the permanent influence 
of Adam Bede and its companions, and it was neces- 
sary, from the moment that the author undertook 
to play the poet's part, to feel that her genius was 
all of one piece. 

People have often asked themselves how they 
would estimate Shakespeare if they knew him only 
by his comedies, Homer if his name stood only for 
the Odyssey, and Milton if he had written nothing 
but "Lycidas" and the shorter pieces. The ques- 
tion of necessity, inevitable though it is, leads to 
nothing. George Eliot is neither Homer nor 
Shakespeare nor Milton ; but her work, like theirs, 
is a massive achievement, divided into a supremely 
good and a less good, and it provokes us, like 
theirs, to the fruitless attempt to estimate the latter 
portion on its own merits alone. 

The little volume before us gives us another op- 
portunity; but here, as before, we find ourselves 
uncomfortably divided between the fear, on the one 
hand, of being bribed into favour, and, on the 
other, of giving short measure of it. The author's 
verses are a narrow manifestation of her genius, 
but they are an unmistakeable manifestation. 
Middlemarch has made us demand even finer 



140 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

things of her than we did before, and whether, as 
patented readers of Middlemarch, we like "Jubal" 
and its companions the less or the more, we must 
admit that they are characteristic products of the 
same intellect. 

We imagine George Eliot is quite philosopher 
enough, having produced her poems mainly as a 
kind of experimental entertainment for her own 
mind, to let them commend themselves to the pub- 
lic on any grounds whatever which will help to il- 
lustrate the workings of versatile intelligence, — as 
interesting failures, if nothing better. She must 
feel they are interesting; an exaggerated modesty 
cannot deny that. 

We have found them extremely so. They con- 
sist of a rhymed narrative, of some length, of the 
career of Jubal, the legendary inventor of the lyre ; 
of a short rustic idyl in blank verse on a theme 
gathered in the Black Forest of Baden; of a tale, 
versified in rhyme, from Boccaccio ; and of a series 
of dramatic scenes called "Armgart," — the best 
thing, to our sense, of the four. To these are 
added a few shorter pieces, chiefly in blank verse, 
each of which seems to us proportionately more 
successful than the more ambitious ones. Our au- 
thor's verse is a mixture of spontaneity of thought 
and excessive reflectiveness of expression and its 
value is generally more in the idea than in the form. 
In whatever George Eliot writes you have the com- 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 141 

fortable certainty, infrequent in other quarters, of 
finding an idea, and you get the substance of her 
thought in the short poems, without the somewhat 
rigid envelope of her poetic diction. 

If we may say, broadly, that the supreme merit 
of a poem is in having warmth, and that it is less 
and less valuable in proportion as it cools by too 
long waiting upon either fastidious skill or ineffi- 
cient skill, the little group of verses entitled 
" Brother and Sister" deserve our preference. 
They have extreme loveliness, and the feeling they 
so abundantly express is of a much less intellectual- 
ised sort than that which prevails in the other 
poems. It is seldom that one of our author's com- 
positions concludes upon so simply sentimental a 
note as the last lines of "Brother and Sister": — 

"But were another childhood-world my share, 
I would be born a little sister there ! " 

This will be interesting to many readers as pro- 
ceeding more directly from the writer's personal 
experience than anything else they remember. 
George Eliot's is a personality so enveloped in the 
mists of reflection that it is an uncommon sensation 
to find one's self in immediate contact with it. 
This charming poem, too, throws a grateful light on 
some of the best pages the author has written, — 
those in which she describes her heroine's childish 
years in The Mill on the Floss. The finest thing in 



142 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

that admirable novel has always been, to our taste, 
not its portrayal of the young girl's love-struggles 
as regards her lover, but those as regards her 
brother. The former are fiction, — skilful fiction; 
but the latter are warm reality, and the merit of 
the verses we speak of is that they are coloured 
from the same source. 

In " Stradivarius, " the famous old violin-maker 
affirms in every pregnant phrase the supreme duty 
of being perfect in one's labour, and lays down the 
dictum, which should be the first article in every 
artist's faith: — 

"'Tis God gives skill, 
But not without men's hands: He could not make 
Antonio Stradivari's violins 
Without Antonio." 

This is the only really inspiring working-creed, and 
our author's utterance of it justifies her claim to 
having the distinctively artistic mind, more forcibly 
than her not infrequent shortcomings in the direc- 
tion of an artistic ensemble. 

Many persons will probably pronounce "A Minor 
Prophet" the gem of this little collection, and it is 
certainly interesting, for a great many reasons. 
It may seem to characterise the author on a number 
of sides. It illustrates vividly, in the extraordi- 
nary ingenuity and flexibility of its diction, her ex- 
treme provocation to indulge in the verbal licence 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 143 

of verse. It reads almost like a close imitation of 
Browning, the great master of the poetical gro- 
tesque, except that it observes a discretion which 
the poet of Red-Cotton Night-caps long ago threw 
overboard. When one can say neat things with 
such rhythmic felicity, why not attempt it, even if 
one has at one's command the magnificent vehicle 
of the style of Middlemarcli? 

The poem is a kindly satire upon the views and 
the person of an American vegetarian, a certain 
Elias Baptist Butterworth, — a gentleman, presum- 
ably, who under another name, as an evening caller, 
has not a little retarded the flight of time for the 
author. Mr. Browning has written nothing better 
than the account of the Butterworthian "Thought 
Atmosphere ' ' : — 

"And when all earth is vegetarian, 
When, lacking butchers, quadrupeds die out, 
And less Thought-atmosphere is re-absorbed 
By nerves of insects parasitical, 
Those higher truths, seized now by higher minds, 
But not expressed (the insects hindering), 
Will either flash out into eloquence, 
Or, better still, be comprehensible, 
By rappings simply, without need of roots." 

The author proceeds to give a sketch of the beatific 
state of things under the vegetarian regime prophe- 
sied by her friend in 



144 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

"Mildly nasal tones, 
And vowels stretched to suit the widest views." 

How, for instance, 

" Sahara will be populous 
With families of gentlemen retired 
From commerce in more Central Africa, 
Who order coolness, as we order coal, 
And have a lobe anterior strong enough 
To think away the sand-storms." 

Or how, as water is probably a non-conductor of 
the Thought-atmosphere, 

" Fishes may lead carnivorous lives obscure, 
But must not dream of culinary rank 
Or being dished in good society." 

Then follows the author's own melancholy head- 
shake and her reflections on the theme that there 
can be no easy millennium, and that 

" Bitterly 
I feel that every change upon this earth 
Is bought with sacrifice"; 

and that, even if Mr. Butterworth 's axioms were 
not too good to be true, one might deprecate them 
in the interest of that happiness which is associated 
with error that is deeply familiar. Human im- 
provement, she concludes, is something both larger 
and smaller than the vegetarian bliss, and consists 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 145 

less in a realised perfection than in the sublime 
dissatisfaction of generous souls with the shortcom- 
ings of the actual. All this is unfolded in verse 
which, if without the absolute pulse of spontaneity, 
has at least something that closely resembles it. 
It has very fine passages. 

Very fine, too, both in passages and as a whole, 
is "The Legend of Jubal." It is noteworthy, by 
the way, that three of these poems are on themes 
connected with music; and yet we remember no 
representation of a musician among the multitudi- 
nous figures which people the author's novels. But 
George Eliot, we take it, has the musical sense in 
no small degree, and the origin of melody and har- 
mony is here described in some very picturesque 
and sustained poetry. 

Jubal invents the lyre and teaches his compan- 
ions and his tribe how to use it, and then goes 
forth to wander in quest of new musical inspira- 
tion. In this pursuit he grows patriarchally old, 
and at last makes his way back to his own people. 
He finds them, greatly advanced in civilisation, 
celebrating what we should call nowadays his cen- 
tennial, and making his name the refrain of their 
songs. He goes in among them and declares him- 
self, but they receive him as a lunatic, and buffet 
him, and thrust him out into the wilderness again, 
where he succumbs to their unconscious ingrati- 
tude. 



146 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

" The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky, 
While Jubal, lonely, laid him down to die." 

In his last hour he has a kind of metaphysical 
vision which consoles him, and enables him to die 
contented. A mystic voice assures him that he has 
no cause for complaint; that his use to mankind 
was everything, and his credit and glory nothing; 
that being rich in his genius, it was his part to 
give, gratuitously, to unendowed humanity; and 
that the knowledge of his having become a part of 
man's joy, and an image in man's soul, should rec- 
oncile him to the prospect of lying senseless in the 
tomb. 'Jubal assents, and expires. 

"A quenched sun-wave, 
The all-creating Presence for his grave." 

This is very noble and heroic doctrine, and is 
enforced in verse not unworthy of it for having a 
certain air of strain and effort ; for surely it is not 
doctrine that the egoistic heart rises to without 
some experimental flutter of the wings. It is 
the expression of a pessimistic philosophy which 
pivots upon itself only in the face of a really for- 
midable ultimatum. We cordially accept it, how- 
ever, and are tolerably confident that the artist in 
general, in his death-throes, will find less repose in 
the idea of a heavenly compensation for earthly 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 147 

neglect than in the certainty that humanity is really 
assimilating his productions. 

" Agatha" is slighter in sentiment than its com- 
panions, and has the vague aroma of an idea rather 
than the positive weight of thought. It is very 
graceful. "How Lisa loved the King" seems to 
us to have, more than its companions, the easy 
flow and abundance of prime poetry ; it wears a re- 
flection of the incomparable naturalness of its 
model in the Decameron. "Armgart" we have 
found extremely interesting, although perhaps it 
offers plainest proof of what the author sacrifices 
in renouncing prose. The drama, in prose, would 
have been vividly dramatic, while, as it stands, we 
have merely a situation contemplated, rather than 
unfolded, in a dramatic light. A great singer loses 
her voice, and a patronising nobleman, who, before 
the calamity, had wished her to become his wife, 
retire from the stage, and employ her genius for 
the beguilement of private life, finds that he has 
urgent business in another neighbourhood, and that 
he has not the mission to espouse her misfortune. 
Armgart rails tremendously at fate, often in very 
striking phrase. The Count of course, in bidding 
her farewell, has hoped that time will soften her 
disappointment : — 

" That empty eup so neatly ciphered, ' Time/ 
Handed me as a cordial for despair. 



148 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

Time — what a word to fling in charity! 

Bland, neutral word for slow, dull-beating pain, — 

Days, months, and years ! " 

We must refer the reader to the poem itself for 
knowledge how resignation comes to so bitter a 
pain as the mutilation of conscious genius. It 
comes to Armgart because she is a very superior 
girl ; and though her outline, here, is at once rather 
sketchy and rather rigid, she may be added to that 
group of magnificently generous women, — the 
Dinahs, the Maggies, the Romolas, the Dorotheas, — 
the representation of whom is our author's chief 
title to our gratitude. But in spite of Armgart 's 
resignation, the moral atmosphere of the poem, like 
that of most of the others and like that of most of 
George Eliot's writings, is an almost gratuitously 
sad one. 

It would take more space than we can command 
to say how it is that at this and at other points our 
author strikes us as a spirit mysteriously perverted 
from her natural temper. We have a feeling that, 
both intellectually and morally, her genius is es- 
sentially of a simpler order than most of her re- 
cent manifestations of it. Intellectually, it has run 
to epigram and polished cleverness, and morally to 
a sort of conscious and ambitious scepticism, with 
which it only half commingles. The interesting 
thing would be to trace the moral divergence from 
the characteristic type. At bottom, according to 



THE POETRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 149 

this notion, the author of Romola and Middlemarch 
has an ardent desire and faculty for positive, active, 
constructive belief of the old-fashioned kind, but 
she has fallen upon a critical age and felt its conta- 
gion and dominion. If, with her magnificent gifts, 
she had been borne by the mighty general current 
in the direction of passionate faith, we often think 
that she would have achieved something incalcu- 
lably great. 



THE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS 



A review of Our Mutual Friend. By Charles Dickens. 
New York: Harper Brothers. 1865. Originally published 
in The Nation, December 21, 1865. 



THE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS 

OUR Mutual Friend is, to our perception, the 
poorest of Mr. Dickens's works. And it is 
poor with the poverty not of momentary embar- 
rassment, but of permanent exhaustion. It is 
wanting in inspiration. For the last ten years it 
has seemed to us that Mr. Dickens has been unmis- 
takeably forcing himself. Bleak House was forced ; 
Little Dorrit was laboured ; the present work is dug 
out as with a spade and pickaxe. 

Of course — to anticipate the usual argument — 
who but Dickens could have written it? Who, in- 
deed? Who else would have established a lady in 
business in a novel on the admirably solid basis of 
her always putting on gloves and tying a handker- 
chief around her head in moments of grief, and of 
her habitually addressing her family with ' ' Peace ! 
hold!" It is needless to say that Mrs. Reginald 
Wilfer is first and last the occasion of considerable 
true humour. When, after conducting her 
daughter to Mrs. Boffin's carriage, in sight of all 
the envious neighbours, she is described as enjoy- 
ing her triumph during the next quarter of an hour 
by airing herself on the doorstep "in a kind of 
153 



154 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

splendidly serene trance," we laugh with as un- 
critical a laugh as could be desired of us. We pay 
the same tribute to her assertions, as she narrates 
the glories of the society she enjoyed at her father's 
table, that she has known as many as three copper- 
plate engravers exchanging the most exquisite sal- 
lies and retorts there at one time. But when to 
these we have added a dozen more happy examples 
of the humour which was exhaled from every line 
of Mr. Dickens's earlier writings, we shall have 
closed the list of the merits of the work before us. 

To say that the conduct of the story, with all 
its complications, betrays a long-practised hand, 
is to pay no compliment worthy the author. If 
this were, indeed, a compliment, we should be in- 
clined to carry it further, and congratulate 
him on his success in what we should call the 
manufacture of fiction; for in so doing we should 
express a feeling that has attended us throughout 
the book. Seldom, we reflected, had we read a 
book so intensely written, so little seen, known, or 
felt. 

In all Mr. Dickens's works the fantastic has 
been his great resource; and while his fancy was 
lively and vigorous it accomplished great things. 
But the fantastic, when the fancy is dead, is a very 
poor business. The movement of Mr. Dickens's 
fancy in Mr. Wilfer and Mr. Boffin and Lady 
Tippins, and the Lammles and Miss Wren, and 



TEE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS 155 

even in Eugene Wr ay burn, is, to our mind, a 
movement lifeless, forced, mechanical. It is the 
letter of his old humour without the spirit. It is 
hardly too much to say that every character here 
put before us is a mere bundle of eccentricities, 
animated by no principle of nature whatever. 

In former days there reigned in Mr. Dickens's 
extravagances a comparative consistency; they 
were exaggerated statements of types that really 
existed. We had, perhaps, never known a New- 
man Noggs, nor a Pecksniff, nor a Micawber; 
but we had known persons of whom these figures 
were but the strictly logical consummation. But 
among the grotesque creatures who occupy the 
pages before us, there is not one whom we can 
refer to as an existing type. In all Mr. Dickens's 
stories, indeed, the reader has been called upon, 
and has willingly consented, to accept a certain 
number of figures or creatures of pure fancy, for 
this was the author's poetry. He was, moreover, 
always repaid for his concession by a peculiar 
beauty or power in these exceptional characters. 
But he is now expected to make the same conces- 
sion, with a very inadequate reward. 

What do we get in return for accepting Miss 
Jenny Wren as a possible person? This young 
lady is the type of a certain class of characters of 
which Mr. Dickens has made a specialty, and with 
which he has been accustomed to draw alternate 



156 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

smiles and tears, according as he pressed one spring 
or another. But this is very cheap merriment and 
very cheap pathos. Miss Jenny Wren is a poor 
little dwarf, afflicted as she constantly reiterates, 
with a "bad back" and "queer legs," who makes 
doll's dresses, and is for ever pricking at those 
with whom she converses in the air, with her 
needle, and assuring them that she knows their 
"tricks and their manners." Like all Mr. Dick- 
ens's pathetic characters, she is a little monster; 
she is deformed, unhealthy, unnatural; she be- 
longs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and 
precocious children who have carried on the sen- 
timental business in all Mr. Dickens's novels; the 
little Nells, the Smikes, the Paul Dombeys. 

Mr. Dickens goes as far out of the way for his 
wicked people as he does for his good ones. Rogue 
Riderhood, indeed, in the present story, is villain- 
ous with a sufficiently natural villainy ; he belongs 
to that quarter of society in which the author is 
most at his ease. But was there ever such wicked- 
ness as that of the Lammles and Mr. Fledgeby? 
Not that people have not been as mischievous as 
they; but was any one ever mischievous in that 
singular fashion? Did a couple of elegant swin- 
dlers ever take such particular pains to be aggres- 
sively inhuman? — for we can find no other word 
for the gratuitous distortions to which they are 
subjected. The word humanity strikes us as 



TEE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS 157 

strangely discordant, in the midst of these pages; 
for, let us boldly declare it, there is no humanity 
here. 

Humanity is nearer home than the Boffins, and 
the Lammles, and the Wilfers, and the Veneerings. 
It is in what men have in common with each 
other, and not what they have in distinction. The 
people just named have nothing in common with 
each other, except the fact that they have nothing 
in common with mankind at large. What a world 
were this world if the world of Our Mutual Friend 
were an honest reflection of it ! But a community 
of eccentrics is impossible. Rules alone are con- 
sistent with each other; exceptions are inconsist- 
ent. Society is maintained by natural sense and 
natural feeling. We cannot conceive a society in 
which these principles are not in some manner rep- 
resented. Where in these pages are the depos- 
itaries of that intelligence without which the 
movement of life would cease? Who represents 
nature ? 

Accepting half of Mr. Dickens's persons as in- 
tentionally grotesque, where are those examplars 
of sound humanity who should afford us the 
proper measure of their companions' variations? 
We ought not, in justice to the author, to seek 
them among his weaker — that is, his mere conven- 
tional — characters; in John Harmon, Lizzie 
Hexam, or Mortimer Lightwood; but we assuredly 



158 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

cannot find them among his stronger — that is, his 
artificial creations. 

Suppose we take Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley 
Headstone. They occupy a half-way position be- 
tween the habitual probable of nature and the 
habitual impossible of Mr. Dickens. A large por- 
tion of the story rests upon the enmity borne by 
Headstone to Wrayburn, both being in love with 
the same woman. Wrayburn is a gentleman, and 
Headstone is one of the people. Wrayburn is well- 
bred, careless, elegant, sceptical, and idle: Head- 
stone is a high-tempered, hard-working, ambitious 
young schoolmaster. There lay in the opposition 
of these two characters a very good story. But 
the prime requisite was that they should be char- 
acters: Mr. Dickens, according to his usual plan, 
has made them simply figures, and between them 
the story that was to be, the story that should have 
been, has evaporated. Wrayburn lounges about 
with his hands in his pockets, smoking a cigar, and 
talking nonsense. Headstone strides about, clench- 
ing his fists and biting his lips and grasping his 
stick. 

There is one scene in which Wrayburn chaffs the 
schoolmaster with easy insolence, while the latter 
writhes impotently under his well-bred sarcasm. 
This scene is very clever, but it is very insufficient. 
If the majority of readers were not so very timid 
in the use of words we should call it vulgar. By 



TEE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS 159 

this we do not mean to indicate the conventional 
impropriety of two gentlemen exchanging lively 
personalities; we mean to emphasise the essentially 
small character of these personalities. In other 
words, the moment, dramatically, is great, while 
the author's conception is weak. The friction of 
two men, of two characters, of two passions, pro- 
duces stronger sparks than Wrayburn's boyish 
repartees and Headstone's melodramatic common- 
places. 

Such scenes as this are useful in fixing the limits 
of Mr. Dickens's insight. Insight is, perhaps, too 
strong a word ; for we are convinced that it is one 
of the chief conditions of his genius not to see 
beneath the surface of things. If we might hazard 
a definition of his literary character, we should, 
accordingly, call him the greatest of superficial 
novelists. We are aware that this definition con- 
fines him to an inferior rank in the department of 
letters which he adorns; but we accept this con- 
sequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, 
an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens 
among the greatest novelists. For, to repeat what 
we have already intimated, he has created nothing 
but figure. He has added nothing to our under- 
standing of human character. He is master of but 
two alternatives: he reconciles us to what is com- 
monplace, and he reconciles us to what is odd. 
The value of the former service is questionable; 



160 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

and the manner in which Mr. Dickens performs 
it sometimes conveys a certain impression of 
charlatanism. The value of the latter service is 
incontestable, and here Mr. Dickens is an honest, 
an admirable artist. 

But what is the condition of the truly great 
novelist? For him there are no alternatives, for 
him there are no oddities, for him there is nothing 
outside of humanity. He cannot shirk it; it im- 
poses itself upon him. For him alone, therefore, 
there is a true and a false; for him alone, it is 
possible to be right, because it is possible to be 
wrong. Mr. Dickens is a great observer and a, 
great humourist, but he is nothing of a philosopher. 

Some people may hereupon say, so much the 
better ; we say, so much the worse. For a novelist 
very soon has need of a little philosophy. In treat- 
ing of Micawber, and Boffin, and Pickwick, et hoc 
genus omne, he can, indeed, dispense with it, for 
this — we say it with all deference — is not serious 
writing. But when he comes to tell the story of a 
passion, a story like that of Headstone and Wray- 
burn, he becomes a moralist as well as an artist. 
He must know man as well as men, and to know 
man is to be a philosopher. 

The writer who knows men alone, if he have Mr. 
Dickens's humour and fancy, will give us figures 
and pictures for which we cannot be too grateful, 
for he will enlarge our knowledge of the world. 



TEE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS 161 

But when he introduces men and women whose 
interest is preconceived to lie not in the poverty, 
the weakness, the drollery of their natures, but 
in their complete and unconscious subjection to or- 
dinary and healthy human emotions, all his hu- 
mour, all his fancy, will avail him nothing if, out 
of the fullness of his sympathy, he is unable to 
prosecute those generalisations in which alone con- 
sists the real greatness of a work of art. 

This may sound like very subtle talk about a 
very simple matter. It is rather very simple talk 
about a very subtle matter. A story based upon 
those elementary passions in which alone we seek 
the true and final manifestation of character must 
be told in a spirit of intellectual superiority to 
these passions. That is, the author must under- 
stand what he is talking about. The perusal of 
a story so told is one of the most elevating ex- 
periences within the reach of the human mind. 
The perusal of a story which is not so told is in- 
finitely depressing and unprofitable. 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 



I. A review of Queen Mary. A Drama. By Alfred Ten- 
nyson. Boston: J. R. Osgood. 1875. Originally pub- 
lished in The Galaxy, September, 1875. 

Queen Mary was produced at the Lyceum Theatre, Lon- 
don, in 1876. Mr. Irving playing the part of Philip II. 
It was Tennyson's wish that he should appear as Cardinal 
Pole, but in the acting version that character was elimi- 
nated. The part of Philip has been immortalized by 
Whistler's celebrated painting of Irving in that role. Ed. 

II. A review of Harold: A Drama. By Alfred Tenny- 
son. London. 1877. Originally published in The Nation, 
January 18, 1877. 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 

I. QUEEN MARY 

ANEW poem by Mr. Tennyson is certain to be 
largely criticised, and if the new poem is a 
drama, the performance must be a great event for 
criticism as well as for poetry. Great surprise, 
great hopes, and great fears had been called into 
being by the announcement that the author of so 
many finely musical lyrics and finished, chiselled 
specimens of narrative verse, had tempted fortune 
in the perilous field of the drama. 

Few poets seemed less dramatic than Tenny- 
son, even in his most dramatic attempts — in 
"Maud," in "Enoch Arden," or in certain of the 
Idyls of the King. He had never used the 
dramatic form, even by snatches; and though no 
critic was qualified to affirm that he had no slum- 
bering ambition in that direction, it seemed likely 
that a poet who had apparently passed the meridian 
of his power had nothing absolutely new to show 
us. On the other hand, if he had for years been 
keeping a gift in reserve, and suffering it to ripen 
and mellow in some deep corner of his genius, 
165 



166 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

while shallower tendencies waxed and waned above 
it, it was not unjust to expect that the consum- 
mate fruit would prove magnificent. 

On the whole, we think that doubt was upper- 
most in the minds of those persons who to a lively 
appreciation of the author of "Maud" added a 
vivid conception of the exigencies of the drama. 
But at last Queen Mary appeared, and conjecture 
was able to merge itself in knowledge. There was 
a momentary interval, during which we all read, 
among the cable telegrams in the newspapers, that 
the London Times affirmed the new drama to eon- 
tain more "true fire" than anything since Shake- 
speare had laid down the pen. This gave an edge 
to our impatience; for "fire," true or false, was 
not what the Laureate's admirers had hitherto 
claimed for him. In a day or two, however, most 
people had the work in their hands. 

Every one, it seems to us, has been justified — 
those who hoped (that is, expected), those who 
feared, and those who were mainly surprised. 
Queen Mary is both better and less good than was 
to have been supposed, and both in its merits and 
its defects it is extremely singular. It is the least 
Tennysonian of all the author's productions; and 
we may say that he has not so much refuted as 
evaded the charge that he is not a dramatic poet. 
To produce his drama he has had to cease to be 
himself. Even if Queen Mary, as a drama, had 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 167 

many more than its actual faults, this fact alone — 
this extraordinary defeasance by the poet of his 
familiar identity — would make it a remarkable 
work. 

We know of few similar phenomena in the his- 
tory of literature — few such examples of rupture 
with a consecrated past. Poets in their prime have 
groped and experimented, tried this and that, 
and finally made a great success in a very differ- 
ent vein from that in which they had found their 
early successes. But the writers in prose or in 
verse are few who, after a lifetime spent in elab- 
orating and perfecting a certain definite and ex- 
tremely characteristic manner, have at Mr. Tenny- 
son's age suddenly dismissed it from use and stood 
forth clad from head to foot in a disguise without 
a flaw. We are sure that the other great English 
poet — the author of "The Ring and the Book," — 
would be quite incapable of any such feat. The 
more's the pity, as many of his readers will say! 

Queen Mary is upward of three hundred pages 
long; and yet in all these three hundred pages 
there is hardly a trace of the Tennyson we know. 
Of course the reader is on the watch for remind- 
ers of the writer he has greatly loved; and of 
course, vivid signs being absent, he finds a certain 
eloquence in the slightest intimations. When he 
reads that 



168 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 



-"that same tide 



Which, coming" with our coming, seemed to smile 
And sparkle like our fortune as thou saidest, 
Ran sunless down and moaned against the piers," 

he seems for a moment to detect the peculiar note 
and rhythm of "Enoch Arden" or "The Princess." 
Just preceding these, indeed, is a line which seems 
Tennysonian because it is in a poem by Tennyson: 

" Last night I climbed into the gate-house, Brett, 
And scared the gray old porter and his wife." 

In such touches as these the Tennysonian note 
is faintly struck; but if the poem were unsigned, 
they would not do much toward pointing out the 
author. On the other hand, the fine passages in 
Queen Mary are conspicuously deficient in those 
peculiar cadences — that exquisite perfume of dic- 
tion — which every young poet of the day has had 
his hour of imitating. We may give as an example 
Pole's striking denial of the charge that the 
Church of Rome has ever known trepidation : 

"What, my Lord! 
The Church on Petra's rock? Never! I have seen 
A pine in Italy that cast its shadow 
Athwart a cataract ; firm stood the pine — 
The cataract shook the shadow. To my mind 
The cataract typed the headlong plunge and fall 
Of heresy to the pit : the pine was Rome. 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 169 

You see, my Lords, 

It was the shadow of the Church that trembled." 

This reads like Tennyson doing his best not to be 
Tennyson, and very fairly succeeding. Well as 
he succeeds, however, and admirably skilful and 
clever as is his attempt throughout to play tricks 
with his old habits of language, and prove that he 
was not the slave but the master of the classic 
Tennysonian rhythm, I think that few readers can 
fail to ask themselves whether the new gift is of 
equal value with the old. The question will per- 
haps set them to fingering over the nearest volume 
of the poet at hand, to refresh their memory of 
his ancient magic. It has rendered the present 
writer this service, and he feels as if it were a 
considerable one. Every great poet has something 
that he does supremely well, and when you come 
upon Tennyson at his best you feel that you are 
dealing with poetry at its highest. One of the 
best passages in Queen Mary — the only one, it 
seems to me, very sensibly warmed by the "fire" 
commemorated by the London Times — is the pas- 
sionate monologue of Mary when she feels what she 
supposes to be the intimations of maternity: 

" He hath awaked, he hath awaked ! 
He stirs within the darkness! 
Oh Philip, husband! how thy love to mine 
"Will cling more close, and those bleak manners thaw, 



170 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

That make me shamed and tongue-tied in my love. 

The second Prince of Peace — 

The great unborn defender of the Faith, 

Who will avenge me of mine enemies — 

He comes, and my star rises. 

The stormy Wyatts and Northumberlands 

And proud ambitions of Elizabeth, 

And all her fiercest partisans, are pale 

Before my star! 

His sceptre shall go forth from Ind to Ind ! 

His sword shall hew the heretic peoples down ! 

His faith shall clothe the world that will be his, 

Like universal air and sunshine! Open, 

Ye everlasting gates! The King is here! — 

My star, my son ! " 

That is very fine, and its broken verses and un- 
even movement have great felicity and suggestive- 
ness. But their magic is as nothing, surely, to 
the magic of such a passage as this: 

" Yet hold me not for ever in thine East ; 
How can my nature longer mix with thine? 
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold 
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet 
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, where the stream 
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes 
Of happy men that have the power to die, 
And grassy barrows of the happier dead. 
Release me and restore me to the ground; 
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave; 
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn; 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 171 

I, earth in earth, forget these empty courts, 
And thee returning on thy silver wheels." 

In these beautiful lines from "Tithonus" there 
is a purity of tone, an inspiration, a something 
sublime and exquisite, which is easily within the 
compass of Mr. Tennyson's usual manner at its 
highest, but which is not easily achieved by any 
really dramatic verse. It is poised and stationary, 
like a bird whose wings have borne him high, but 
the beauty of whose movement is less in great 
ethereal sweeps and circles than in the way he 
hangs motionless in the blue air, with only a 
vague tremor of his pinions. Even if the idea with 
Tennyson were more largely dramatic than it 
usually is, the immobility, as we must call it, of his 
phrase would always defeat the dramatic inten- 
tion. When he wishes to represent movement, the 
phrase always seems to me to pause and slowly 
pivot upon itself, or at most to move backward. 
I do not know whether the reader recognizes the 
peculiarity to which I allude ; one has only to open 
Tennyson almost at random to find an example of 
it: 

" For once when Arthur, walking all alone, 
Vext at a rumour rife about the Queen, 
Had met her, Vivien being greeted fair, 
Would fain have wrought upon his cloudy mood 
With reverent eyes mock-loyal, shaken voice, 
And fluttered adoration." 



172 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

That perhaps is a subtle illustration; the allu- 
sion to Teolin's dog in "Aylmer's Field" is a 
franker one: 

"his old Newfoundlands, when they ran 



To lose him at the stables ; for he rose, 
Two-footed, at the limit of his chain, 
Roaring to make a third." 

What these pictures present is not the action it- 
self, but the poet's complex perception of it; it 
seems hardly more vivid and genuine than the sus- 
tained posturings of brilliant tableaux vivants. 
With the poets who are natural chroniclers of 
movement, the words fall into their places as with 
some throw of the dice, which fortune should al- 
ways favour. With Scott and Byron they leap into 
the verse a pieds joints, and shake it with their 
coming; with Tennyson they arrive slowly and 
settle cautiously into their attitudes, after having 
well scanned the locality. In consequence they 
are generally exquisite, and make exquisite com- 
binations; but the result is intellectual poetry and 
not passionate — poetry which, if the term is not 
too pedantic, one may qualify as static poetry. 
Any scene of violence represented by Tennyson is 
always singularly limited and compressed; it is 
reduced to a few elements — refined to a single 
statuesque episode. There are, for example, sev- 
eral descriptions of tournaments and combats in 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 173 

the Idyls of the King. They are all most beau- 
tiful, but they are all curiously delicate. One gets 
no sense of the din and shock of battle ; one seems 
to be looking at a bas relief of two contesting 
knights in chiselled silver, on a priceless piece of 
plate. They belong to the same family as that 
charming description, in Hawthorne 's Marble Faun, 
of the sylvan dance of Donatello and Miriam in 
the Borghese gardens. Hawthorne talks of the 
freedom and frankness of their mirth and revelry ; 
what we seem to see is a solemn frieze in stone 
along the base of a monument. These are the nat- 
ural fruits of geniuses who are of the brooding 
rather than the impulsive order. I do not mean 
to say that here and there Tennyson does not give 
us a couplet in which motion seems reflected with- 
out being made to tarry. I open "Enoch Arden" 
at hazard, and I read of Enoch's ship that 

" at first indeed 



Thro' many a fair sea-circle, day by day, 
Scarce rocking, her full-busted figure-head 
Stared o'er the ripple feathering from her bows." 

I turn the page and read of 

" The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean fowl, 
The league-long roller thundering on the reef, 
The moving whisper of huge trees that branched 
And blossomed in the zenith"; 



174 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

of 

"The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 
Among the palms and ferns and precipices; 
The blaze upon the waters to the east; 
The blaze upon his island overhead; 
The blaze upon the waters to the west; 
Then the great stars that globed themselves in 

Heaven, 
The hollower-bellowing Ocean, and again 
The scarlet shafts of sunrise." 

These lines represent movement on the grand 
natural scale — taking place in that measured, ma- 
jestic fashion which, at any given moment, seems 
identical with permanence. One is almost ashamed 
to quote Tennyson; one can hardly lay one's hand 
on a passage that does not form part of the com- 
mon stock of reference and recitation. Passages 
of the more impulsive and spontaneous kind will 
of course chiefly be found in his lyrics and rhymed 
verses (though rhyme would at first seem but 
another check upon his freedom) ; and passages of 
the kind to which I have been calling attention, 
chiefly in his narrative poems, in the Idyls gen- 
erally, and especially in the later ones, while the 
words strike one as having been pondered and 
collated with an almost miserly care. 

But a man has always the qualities of his de- 
fects, and if Tennyson is what I have called a 
static poet, he at least represents repose and still- 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 175 

ness and the fixedness of things, with a splendour 
that no poet has surpassed. We all of this genera- 
tion have lived in such intimacy with him, and 
made him so much part of our regular intellectual 
meat and drink, that it requires a certain effort 
to hold him off at the proper distance for scanning 
him. We need to cease mechanically murmuring 
his lines, so that we may hear them speak for them- 
selves. 

Few persons who have grown up within the last 
forty years but have passed through the regular 
Tennysonian phase; happy few who have paid it 
a merely passive tribute, and not been moved to 
commit their emotions to philosophic verse, in the 
metre of "In Memoriam"! The phase has lasted 
longer with some persons than with others; but it 
will not be denied that with the generation at large 
it has visibly declined. The young persons of 
twenty now read Tennyson (though, as we im- 
agine, with a fervour less intense than that which 
prevailed twenty years ago) ; but the young per- 
sons of thirty read Browning and Dante Kossetti, 
and Omar Kheyam — and are also sometimes heard 
to complain that poetry is dead and that there is 
nothing nowadays to read. 

We have heard Tennyson called " dainty' ' so 
often, we have seen so many allusions to the ' ' Ten- 
nysonian trick," we have been so struck, in a cer- 
tain way, with M. Taine's remarkable portrait of 



176 EARLY VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

the poet, in contrast to that of Alfred de Musset, 
that every one who has anything of a notion of 
keeping abreast of what is called the "culture of the 
time" is rather shy of making an explicit, or even 
a serious profession of admiration for his earlier 
idol. It has long been the fashion to praise Byron, 
if one praises him at all, with an apologetic smile ; 
and Tennyson has been, I think, in a measure, 
tacitly classed with the author of "Childe Harold" 
as a poet whom one thinks most of while one 's taste 
is immature. 

This is natural enough, I suppose, and the taste 
of the day must travel to its opportunity's end. 
But I do not believe that Byron has passed, by any 
means, and I do not think that Tennyson has been 
proved to be a secondary or a tertiary poet. If 
he is not in the front rank, it is hard to see what 
it is that constitutes exquisite quality. There are 
poets of a larger compass; he has not the passion 
of Shelley nor the transcendent meditation of 
Wordsworth ; but his inspiration, in its own current, 
is surely as pure as theirs. He depicts the assured 
beauties of life, the things that civilisation has 
gained and permeated, and he does it with an in- 
effable delicacy of imagination. Only once, as it 
seems to me (at the close of "Maud"), has he 
struck the note of irrepressible emotion, and ap- 
peared to say the thing that must be said at the 
moment, at any cost. For the rest, his verse is the 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 177 

verse of leisure, of luxury, of contemplation, of a 
faculty that circumstances have helped to become 
fastidious; but this leaves it a wide province — a 
province that it fills with a sovereign splendour. 

When a poet is such an artist as Tennyson, such 
an unfaltering, consummate master, it is no shame 
to surrender one's self to his spell. Reading him 
over here and there, as I have been doing, I have 
received an extraordinary impression of talent — 
talent ripened and refined, and passed, with a hun- 
dred incantations, through the crucible of taste. 
The reader is in thoroughly good company, and if 
the language is to a certain extent that of a coterie, 
the coterie can offer convincing evidence of its 
right to be exclusive. Its own tone is exquisite; 
listen to it, and you will desire nothing more. 

Tennyson's various Idyls have been in some de- 
gree discredited by insincere imitations, and in some 
degree, perhaps, by an inevitable lapse of sympathy 
on the part of some people from what appears their 
falsetto pitch. That King Arthur, in the great 
ones of the series, is rather a prig, and that he 
couldn't have been all the poet represents him with- 
out being a good deal of a hypocrite ; that the poet 
himself is too monotonously unctuous, and that in 
relating the misdeeds of Launcelot and Guinevere 
he seems, like the lady in the play in "Hamlet," to 
"protest too much" for wholesomeness — all this has 
been often said, and said with abundant force. But 



178 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

there is a way of reading the Idyls, one and all, 
and simply enjoying them. It has been, just now, 
the way of the writer of these lines ; he does not ex- 
actly know what may be gained by taking the other 
way, but he feels as if there were a pitiful Iosp in 
not taking this one. If one surrenders one's sense 
to their perfect picturesqueness, it is the most 
charming poetry in the world. The prolonged, deli- 
cate, exquisite sustentation of the pictorial tone 
seems to me a marvel of ingenuity and fancy. It 
appeals to a highly cultivated sense, but what en- 
joyment is so keen as that of the cultivated sense 
when its finer nerve is really touched? The 
Idyls all belong to the poetry of association; but 
before they were written we had yet to learn how 
finely association could be analysed, and how softly 
its chords could be played upon. When Enoch 
Arden came back from his desert island, 

" He like a lover down through all his blood 
Drew in the dewy, meadowy morning breath 
Of England, blown across her ghostly wall." 

Tennyson's solid verbal felicities, his unerring 
sense of the romantic, his acute perception of every- 
thing in nature that may contribute to his fund of 
exquisite imagery, his refinement, his literary tone, 
his aroma of English lawns and English libraries, 
the whole happy chance of his selection of the 
Arthurian legends — all this, and a dozen minor 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 179 

graces which it would take almost his own ' ' dainti- 
ness" to formulate, make him, it seems to me, the 
most charming of the entertaining poets. It is as 
an entertaining poet I chiefly think of him; his 
morality, at moments, is certainly importunate 
enough, but elevated as it is, it never seems to me 
of so fine a distillation as his imagery. As a didac- 
tic creation I do not greatly care for King Arthur ; 
but as a fantastic one he is infinitely remunerative. 
He is doubtless not, as an intellectual conception, 
massive enough to be called a great figure ; but he is, 
picturesquely, so admirably self-consistent, that the 
reader's imagination is quite willing to turn its 
back, if need be, on his judgment, and give itself 
up to idle enjoyment. 

As regards Tennyson's imagery, anything that 
one quotes in illustration is, as I have said, cer- 
tain to be extremely familiar; but even familiarity 
can hardly dull the beauty of such a touch as that 
about Merlin's musings: 

" So dark a forethought rolled about his brain, 
As on a dull day in an Ocean cave 
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
In silence." 

Or of that which puts in vivid form the estrange- 
ment of Enid and Geraint: 

" The two remained 
Apart by all the chamber's width, and mute 



180 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

As creatures voiceless through the fault of birth, 
Or two wild men, supporters of a shield, 
Painted, who stare at open space, nor glance 
The one at other, parted by the shield." 

Happy, in short, the poet who can offer his heroine 
for her dress 

i " a splendid silk of foreign loom, 



Where, like a shoaling sea, the lovely blue 
Played into green." 

I have touched here only upon Tennyson's nar- 
rative poems, because they seemed most in order 
in any discussion of the author's dramatic faculty. 
They cannot be said to place it in an eminent 
light, and they remind one more of the courage 
than of the discretion embodied in Queen Mary. 
Lovely pictures of things standing, with a sort of 
conscious stillness, for their poetic likeness, meas- 
ured speeches, full of delicate harmonies and curi- 
ous cadences — these things they contain in plenty, 
but little of that liberal handling of cross-speaking 
passion and humour which, with a strong construc- 
tive faculty, we regard as the sign of a genuine 
dramatist. 

The dramatic form seems to me of all literary 
forms the very noblest. I have so extreme a relish 
for it that I am half afraid to trust myself to 
praise it, lest I should seem to be merely rhap- 
sodizing. But to be really noble it must be quite 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 181 

itself, and between a poor drama and a fine one 
there is, I think, a wider interval than anywhere 
else in the scale of success. A sequence of 
speeches headed by proper names — a string of dia- 
logues broken into acts and scenes — does not con- 
stitute a drama; not even when the speeches are 
very clever and the dialogue bristles with 
"points." 

The fine thing in a real drama, generally speak- 
ing, is that, more than any other work of literary 
art, it needs a masterly structure. It needs to be 
shaped and fashioned and laid together, and this 
process makes a demand upon an artist's rarest 
gifts. He must combine and arrange, interpolate 
and eliminate, play the joiner with the most atten- 
tive skill; and yet at the end effectually bury his 
tools and his sawdust, and invest his elaborate 
skeleton with the smoothest and most polished 
integument. The five-act drama — serious or hu- 
mourous, poetic or prosaic — is like a box of fixed 
dimensions and inelastic material, into which a 
mass of precious things are to be packed away. It 
is a problem in ingenuity and a problem of the 
most interesting kind. The precious things in 
question seem out of all proportion to the compass 
of the receptacle; but the artist has an assurance 
that with patience and skill a place may be made 
for each, and that nothing need be clipped or 
crumpled, squeezed or damaged. The false 



182 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

dramatist either knocks out the sides of his box, 
or plays the deuce with the contents ; the real one 
gets down on his knees, disposes of his goods tenta- 
tively, this, that, and the other way, loses his 
temper but keeps his ideal, and at last rises in 
triumph, having packed his coffer in the one way 
that is mathematically right. It closes perfectly, 
and the lock turns with a click; between one ob- 
ject and another you cannot insert the point of a 
penknife. 

To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid 
laws, is always a strong man 's highest ideal of suc- 
cess. The reader cannot be sure how deeply con- 
scious Mr. Tennyson has been of the laws of the 
drama, but it would seem as if he had not very 
attentively pondered them. In a play, certainly, 
the subject is of more importance than in any 
other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness 
of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, 
or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity 
of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the 
essence of the work — it is the work. If it is fee- 
ble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, 
the work must be amorphous. 

Queen Mary, I think, has this fundamental weak- 
ness ; it would be very hard to say what its subject 
is. Strictly speaking, the drama has none. To 
the statement, "It is the reign of the elder daugh- 
ter of Henry VIII.," it seems to me very nearly 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 183 

fair to reply that that is not a subject. I do not 
mean to say that a consummate dramatist could 
not resolve it into one, but the presumption is al- 
together against it. It cannot be called an in- 
trigue, nor treated as one; it tends altogether to 
expansion; whereas a genuine dramatic subject 
should tend to concentration. 

Madame Ristori, that accomplished tragedienne, 
has for some years been carrying about the world 
with her a piece of writing, punctured here and 
there with curtain-falls, which she presents to nu- 
merous audiences as a tragedy embodying the his- 
tory of Queen Elizabeth. The thing is worth men- 
tioning only as an illustration ; it is from the hand 
of a prolific Italian purveyor of such wares, and is 
as bad as need be. Many of the persons who read 
these lines will have seen it, and will remember it 
as a mere bald sequence of anecdotes, roughly cast 
into dialogue. It is not incorrect to say that, as 
regards form, Mr. Tennyson 's drama is of the same 
family as the historical tragedies of Signor Giaco- 
metti. It is simply a dramatised chronicle, without 
an internal structure, taking its material in pieces, 
as history hands them over, and working each one 
up into an independent scene — usually with rich 
ability. It has no shape ; it is cast into no mould ; 
it has neither beginning, middle, nor end, save the 
chronological ones. 

A work of this sort may have a great many merits 



184 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

(those of Queen Mary are numerous), but it can- 
not have the merit of being a drama. We have, in- 
deed, only to turn to Shakespeare to see how much 
of pure dramatic interest may be infused into an 
imperfect dramatic form. Henry IV. and the oth- 
ers of its group, Richard III., Henry VIII., An- 
tony and Cleopatra, Julius Ccesar, are all chron- 
icles in dialogue, are all simply Holinshed and Plu- 
tarch transferred into immortal verse. They are 
magnificent because Shakespeare could do nothing 
weak; but all Shakespearian as they are, they are 
not models; the models are Hamlet and Othello, 
Macbeth and Lear. Tennyson is not Shakespeare, 
but in everything he had done hitherto there had 
been an essential perfection, and we are sorry that, 
in the complete maturity of his talent, proposing to 
write a drama, he should have chosen the easy way 
rather than the hard. 

He chose, however, a period out of which a com- 
pact dramatic subject of the richest interest might 
well have been wrought. For this, of course, con- 
siderable invention would have been needed, and 
Mr. Tennyson had apparently no invention to bring 
to his task. He has embroidered cunningly the 
groundwork offered him by Mr. Froude, but he has 
contributed no new material. The field offers a 
great stock of dramatic figures, and one's imagi- 
nation kindles as one thinks of the multifarious 
combinations into which they might have been cast. 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 185 

We do not pretend of course to say in detail what 
Mr. Tennyson might have done ; we simply risk the 
affirmation that he might have wrought a somewhat 
denser tissue. History certainly would have suf- 
fered, but poetry would have gained, and he is writ- 
ing poetry and not history. As his drama stands, 
we take it that he does not pretend to have deep- 
ened our historic light. 

Psychologically, picturesquely, the persons in the 
foreground of Mary's reign constitute a most im- 
pressive and interesting group. The imagination 
plays over it importunately, and wearies itself with 
scanning the outlines and unlighted corners. Mary 
herself unites a dozen strong dramatic elements — 
in her dark religious passion, her unrequited con- 
jugal passion, her mixture of the Spanish and Eng- 
lish natures, her cruelty and her conscience, her 
high-handed rule and her constant insecurity. 
With her dark figure lighted luridly by perpetual 
martyr-fires, and made darker still by the presence 
of her younger sister, radiant with the promise of 
England 's coming greatness ; with Lady Jane Grey 
groping for the block behind her ; her cold fanatic 
of a husband beside her, as we know him by Velas- 
quez (with not a grain of fanaticism to spare for 
her) ; with her subtle ecclesiastical cousin Pole on 
the other side, with evil counsellors and dogged 
martyrs and a threatening people all around her, 
and with a lonely, dreary, disappointed and un- 



186 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

lamented death before her, she is a subject made to 
the hand of a poet who should know how to mingle 
cunningly his darker shades. Tennyson has elabo- 
rated her figure in a way that is often masterly ; it 
is a success — the greatest success of the poem. It 
is compounded in his hands of very subtle elements, 
and he keeps them from ever becoming gross. 

The Mary of his pages is a complex personage, 
and not what she might so easily become — a mere 
picturesque stalking-horse of melodrama. The art 
with which he has still kept her sympathetic and 
human, at the same time that he has darkened the 
shadows in her portrait to the deepest tone that 
he had warrant for, is especially noticeable. It is 
not in Mr. Tennyson's pages that Mary appears for 
the first time in the drama ; she gives her name to 
a play of Victor Hugo 's dating from the year 1833 
— the prime of the author's career. I have just 
been reading over Marie Tudor, and it has sug- 
gested a good many reflections. I think it probable 
that many of the readers of Queen Mary would be 
quite unable to peruse Victor Hugo 's consummately 
unpleasant production to the end; but they would 
admit, I suppose, that a person who had had the 
stomach to do so might have something particular 
to say about it. 

If one had an eye for contrasts, the contrast be- 
tween these two works is extremely curious. I said 
just now that Tennyson had brought no invention 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 187 

to his task; but it may be said, on the other side, 
that Victor Hugo has brought altogether too much. 
If Tennyson has been unduly afraid of remodelling 
history, the author of Marie Tudor has known no 
such scruples; he has slashed into the sacred chart 
with the shears of a romantique of 1830. Al- 
though Tennyson, in a general way, is an essen- 
tially picturesque poet, his picturesqueness is of an 
infinitely milder type than that of Victor Hugo; 
the one ends where the other begins. With Victor 
Hugo the horrible is always the main element of 
the picturesque, and the beautiful and the tender 
are rarely introduced save to give it relief. In 
Marie Tudor they cannot be said to be introduced 
at all; the drama is one masterly compound of 
abominable horror; horror for horror's sake — for 
the sake of chiaroscuro, of colour, of the footlights, 
of the actors ; not in the least in any visible interest 
of human nature, of moral verity, of the discrimi- 
nation of character. 

What Victor Hugo has here made of the rigid, 
strenuous, pitiable English queen seems to me a 
good example of how little the handling of sinister 
passions sometimes costs a genius of his type — how 
little conviction or deep reflection goes with it. 
There was a Mary of a far keener tragic interest 
than the epigrammatic Messalina whom he has por- 
trayed; but her image was established in graver 
and finer colours, and he passes jauntily beside it, 



188 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

without suspecting its capacity. Marie Tudor is a 
lascivious termagant who amuses herself, first, with 
caressing an Italian adventurer, then with slapping 
his face, and then with dabbling in his blood ; but 
we do not really see why the author should have 
given his heroine a name which history held in her 
more or less sacred keeping; one's interest in the 
drama would have been more comfortable if the 
persons, in their impossible travesty, did not pre- 
sent themselves as old friends. It is true that the 
" Baron of Dinasmonddy ' ' can hardly be called an 
old friend ; but he is at least as familiar as the Earl 
of Clanbrassil, the Baron of Darmouth in Devon- 
shire, and Lord South-Repps. 

Marie Tudor, then has little to do with nature 
and nothing with either history or morality; and 
yet, without a paradox, it has some very strong 
qualities. It is at any rate a genuine drama, and 
it succeeds thoroughly well in what it attempts. 
It is moulded and proportioned to a definite scenic 
end, and never falters in its course. To read it 
just after you have read Queen Mary brings out its 
merits, as well as its defects; and if the contrast 
makes you inhale with a double satisfaction the 
clearer moral atmosphere of the English work, it 
leads you also to reflect with some gratitude that 
dramatic tradition, in our modern era, has not re- 
mained solely in English hands. 

Mr. Tennyson has very frankly fashioned his 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 189 

play upon the model of the Shakespearian "his- 
tories." He has given us the same voluminous list 
of characters; he has made the division into acts 
merely arbitrary; he has introduced low-life inter- 
locutors, talking in archaic prose ; and whenever the 
fancy has taken him, he has culled his idioms and 
epithets from the Shakespearian vocabulary. As 
regards this last point, he has shown all the tact 
and skill that were to be expected from so approved 
a master of language. The prose scenes are all of 
a quasi-humourous description, and they emulate 
the queer jocosities of Shakespeare more success- 
fully than seemed probable ; though it was not to be 
forgotten that the author of the "Palace of Art" 
was also the author of the "Northern Farmer." 
These few lines might have been taken straight 
from Henry IV. or Henry VIII.: 

" No ; we know that you be come to kill the Queen, and 
we'll pray for you all on our bended knees. But o' 
God's mercy, don't you kill the Queen here, Sir Thomas ; 
look ye, here's little Dickon, and little Robin, and little 
Jenny — though she's but a side cousin — and all, on 
our knees, we pray you to kill the Queen farther off, 
Sir Thomas." 

The poet, however, is modern when he chooses 
to be: 

" Action and reaction, 
The miserable see-saw of our child-world, 
Make us despise it at odd hours, my Lord." 



190 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

That reminds one less of the Elizabethan than of 
the Victorian era. Mr. Tennyson has desired to 
give a general picture of the time, to reflect all its 
leading elements and commemorate its salient epi- 
sodes. From this point of view England herself — 
England struggling and bleeding in the clutches of 
the Romish wolf, as he would say — is the heroine of 
the drama. This heroine is very nobly and vividly 
imaged, and we feel the poet to be full of a retro- 
active as well as a present patriotism. It is a plain 
Protestant attitude that he takes; there is no at- 
tempt at analysis of the Catholic sense of the situ- 
ation; it is quite the old story that we learned in 
our school-histories as children. We do not mean 
that this is not the veracious way of presenting it ; 
but we notice the absence of that tendency to place 
it in different lights, accumulate pros and cons, and 
plead opposed causes in the interest of ideal truth, 
which would have been so obvious if Mr. Browning 
had handled the theme. And yet Mr. Tennyson 
has been large and liberal, and some of the finest 
passages in the poem are uttered by independent 
Catholics. The author has wished to give a hint 
of everything, and he has admirably divined the 
anguish of mind of many men who were unpre- 
pared to go with the new way of thinking, and yet 
were scandalised at the license of the old — who 
were willing to be Catholics, and yet not willing 
to be delivered over to Spain. 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 191 

Where so many episodes are sketched, few of 
course can be fully developed ; but there is a vivid 
manliness of the classic English type in such por- 
traits as Lord William Howard and Sir Ralph 
Bagenhall — poor Sir Ralph, who declares that 

" Far liefer had I in my country hall 
Been reading some old book, with mine old hound 
Couch'd at my hearth, and mine old flask of wine 
Beside me," 

than stand as he does in the thick of the trouble 
of the time; and who finally is brought to his ac- 
count for not having knelt with the commons to the 
legate of Charles V. We have a glimpse of Sir 
Thomas Wyatt's insurrection, and a portrait of 
that robust rebel, who was at the same time an 
editor of paternal sonnets — sonnets of a father who 
loved 

" To read and rhyme in solitary fields, 
The lark above, the nightingale below, 
And answer them in song." 

We have a very touching report of Lady Jane 
Grey's execution, and we assist almost directly at 
the sad perplexities of poor Cranmer's eclipse. We 
appreciate the contrast between the fine nerves and 
many-sided conscience of that wavering martyr, 
and the more comfortable religious temperament of 
Bonner and Gardiner — Bonner, apt ''to gorge a 



192 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

heretic whole, roasted, or raw ; ' ' and Gardiner, who 
can say, 

" Fve gulpt it down ; I'm wholly for the Pope, 
Utterly and altogether for the Pope, 
The Eternal Peter of the changeless chair, 
Crowned slave of slaves and mitred king of kings. 
God upon earth! What more? What would you 
have?" 

Elizabeth makes several appearances, and though 
they are brief, the poet has evidently had a definite 
figure in his mind's eye. On a second reading it 
betrays a number of fine intentions. The circum- 
spection of the young princess, her high mettle, her 
coquetry, her frankness, her coarseness, are all rap- 
idly glanced at. Her exclamation — 

" I would I were a milkmaid, 
To sing, love, marry, churn, brew, bake, and die, 
And have my simple headstone by the church, 
And all things lived and ended honestly " — 

marks one limit of the sketch; and the other is in- 
dicated by her reply to Cecil at the end of the 
drama, on his declaring, in allusion to Mary, that 
" never English monarch dying left England so 
little": 

" But with Cecil's aid 
And others', if our person be secured 
From traitor stabs, we will make England great ! " 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 193 

The middle term is perhaps marked by her re- 
ception of the functionary who comes to inform her 
that her sister bids her know that the King of Spain 
desires her to marry Prince Philibert of Savoy : 

" I thank you heartily, sir, 
But I am royal, tho' your prisoner, 
And God hath blessed or cursed me with a nose — 
Your boots are from the horses." 

The drama is deficient in male characters of 
salient interest. Philip is vague and blank, as he 
is evidently meant to be, and Cardinal Pole is a 
portrait of a character constitutionally inapt for 
breadth of action. The portrait is a skilful one, 
however, and expresses forcibly the pangs of a sen- 
sitive nature entangled in trenchant machinery. 
There is a fine scene near the close of the drama in 
which Pole and the Queen — cousins, old friends, 
and for a moment betrothed (Victor Hugo charac- 
teristically assumes Mary to have been her cousin's 
mistress) — confide to each other their weariness and 
disappointment. Mary endeavours to console the 
Cardinal, but he has only grim answers for her : 

" Our altar is a mound of dead men's clay, 
Dug from the grave that yawns for us beyond ; 
And there is one Death stands beside the Groom, 
And there is one Death stands beside the Bride." 



194 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

Queen Mary, I believe, is to be put upon the stage 
next winter in London. I do not pretend to fore- 
cast its success in representation; but it is not in- 
discrete to say that it will suffer from the absence 
of a man's part capable of being made striking. 
The very clever Mr. Henry Irving has, we are told, 
offered his services, presumably to play either 
Philip or Pole. If he imparts any great relief to 
either figure, it will be a signal proof of talent. 
The actress, however, to whom the part of the 
Queen is allotted will have every reason to be grate- 
ful. The character is full of colour and made to 
utter a number of really dramatic speeches. When 
Renard assures her that Philip is only waiting for 
leave of the Parliament to land on English shores 
she has an admirable outbreak: 

" God change the pebble which his kingly foot 
First presses into some more costly stone 

Than ever blinded eye. I'll have one mark it 
And bring it me. I'll have it burnished firelike; 
I'll set it round with gold, with pearl, with diamond. 
Let the great angel of the Church come with him, 
Stand on the deck and spread his wings for sail ! " 

Mary is not only vividly conceived from within, 
but her physiognomy, as seen from without, is indi- 
cated with much pictorial force : 

" Did you mark our Queen ? 
The colour freely played into her face, 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 195 

And the half sight which makes her look so stern 
Seemed, through that dim, dilated world of hers, 
To read our faces." 

In the desolation of her last days, when she bids 
her attendants go to her sister and 

" Tell her to come and close my dying eyes 
And wear my crown and dance upon my grave," 

Mary, to attest her misery, seats herself on the 
ground, like Constance in "King John"; and the 
comment of one of her women hereupon is strik- 
ingly picturesque : 

" Good Lord ! how grim and ghastly looks her Grace, 
With both her knees drawn upward to her chin. 
There was an old-world tomb beside my father's, 
And this was opened, and the dead were found 
Sitting, and in this fashion ; she looks a corpse." 

The great merit of Mr. Tennyson's drama, how- 
ever, is not in the quotableness of certain passages, 
but in the thoroughly elevated spirit of the whole. 
He desired to make us feel of what sound manly 
stuff the Englishmen of that Tudor reign of terror 
needed to be, and his verse is pervaded by the echo 
of their deep-toned refusal to abdicate their man- 
hood. The temper of the poem, on this line, is so 
noble that the critic who has indulged in a few 
strictures as to matters of form feels as if he had 
been frivolous and niggardly. I nevertheless ven- 



196 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

ture to add in conclusion that Queen Mary seems to 
me a work of rare ability rather than great inspira- 
tion; a powerful tour de force rather than a la- 
bour of love. But though it is not the best of a 
great poet's achievement, only a great poet could 
have written it. 

II. HAROLD 

The author of Queen Mary seems disposed to 
show us that that work was not an accident, but 
rather, as it may be said, an incident of his 
literary career. The incident has just been re- 
peated, though Harold has come into the world 
more quietly than its predecessor. 

It is singular how soon the public gets used to 
unfamiliar notions. By the time the reader has 
finished Harold he has almost contracted the habit 
of thinking of Mr. Tennyson as a writer chiefly 
known to fame by "dramas" without plots and dia- 
logues without point. This impression it behooves 
him, of course, to shake off if he wishes to judge 
the book properly. He must compare the author of 
"Maud" and the earlier Idyls with the great poets, 
and not with the small. Harold would be a respect- 
able production for a writer who had spent his 
career in producing the same sort of thing, but it 
is a somewhat graceless anomaly in the record of a 
poet whose verse has, in a large degree, become part 
of the civilisation of his day. 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 197 

Queen Mary was not, on the whole, pronounced 
a success, and Harold, roughly speaking, is to 
Queen Mary what that work is to the author's earl- 
ier masterpieces. Harold is not in the least bad: 
it contains nothing ridiculous, unreasonable, or dis- 
agreeable ; it is only decidedly weak, decidedly col- 
ourless, and tame. The author's inspiration is like 
a fire which is quietly and contentedly burning low. 
The analogy is perfectly complete. The hearth is 
clean swept and the chimney-side is garnished with 
its habitual furniture; but the room is getting 
colder and colder, and the occasional little flickers 
emitted by the mild embers are not sufficient to 
combat the testimony of the poetical thermometer. 
There is nothing necessarily harsh in this judgment. 
Few fires are always at a blaze, and the imagina- 
tion, which is the most delicate machine in the 
world, cannot be expected to serve longer than a 
good gold repeater. We must take what it gives us, 
in every case, and be thankful. Mr. Tennyson is 
perfectly welcome to amuse himself with listening 
to the fainter tick of his honoured time-piece ; it is 
going still, unquestionably; it has not stopped. 
Only we may without rudeness abstain from regu- 
lating our engagements by the indications of the in- 
strument. 

Harold seems at first to have little, in form, that 
is characteristic of the author — little of the 
thoroughly familiar Tennysonian quality. Never- 



198 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

theless, there is every now and then a line which 
arrests the ear by the rhythm and cadence which 
have always formed the chief mystery in the art 
of imitating the Laureate. 
Meeting in the early pages such a line as 

"What, with this flaming horror overhead?" 

we should suspect we were reading Tennyson if 
we did not know it; and our suspicion would be 
amply confirmed by half a dozen other lines : 

" Taken the rifted pillars of the wood." 

" My greyhounds fleeting like a beam of light." 

" Suffer a stormless shipwreck in the pools." 

" That scared the dying conscience of the king." 

Harold is interesting as illustrating, in addition 
to Queen Mary, Mr. Tennyson 's idea of what makes 
a drama. A succession of short scenes, detached 
from the biography of a historical character, is, ap- 
parently, to his sense sufficient; the constructive 
side of the work is thereby reduced to a primitive 
simplicity. It is even more difficult to imagine act- 
ing Harold than it was to imagine acting Queen 
Mary; and it is probable that in this case the ex- 
periment will not be tried. And yet the story, or 
rather the historical episode, upon which Mr. Ten- 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 199 

nyson has here laid his hand is eminently interest- 
ing. 

Harold, the last of the ' ' English, ' ' as people of a 
certain way of feeling are fond of calling him — the 
son of Godwin, masterful minister of Edward the 
Confessor, the wearer for a short and hurried hour 
of the English crown, and the opponent and victim 
of William of Normandy on the field of Hastings 
— is a figure which combines many of the elements 
of romance and of heroism. The author has very 
characteristically tried to accentuate the moral 
character of his hero by making him a sort of dis- 
tant relation of the family of Galahad and Arthur 
and the other moralising gallants to whom his pages 
have introduced us. Mr. Tennyson's Harold is a 
warrior who talks about his ' ' better self, ' ' and who 
alludes to 

"Waltham, my foundation 
For men who serve their neighbour, not themselves," 

— a touch which transports us instantly into the 
atmosphere of the Arthurian Idyls. But Harold's 
history may be very easily and properly associated 
with a moral problem, inasmuch as it was his un- 
happy fortune to have to solve, practically, a knotty 
point which might have been more comfortably left 
to the casuists. Shipwrecked during Edward's life 
upon the coast of Normandy, he is betrayed into the 
hands of Duke William, who already retains as hos- 



200 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

tage one of his brothers (the sons of Godwin were 
very numerous, and they all figure briefly, but with 
a certain attempt at individual characterisation, in 
the drama). To purchase his release and that of 
his brother, who passionately entreats him, he con- 
sents to swear by certain unseen symbols, which 
prove afterwards to be the bones of certain august 
Norman saints, that if William will suffer him to 
return to England, he will, on the Confessor's 
death, abstain from urging the claim of the latter 's 
presumptive heir and do his utmost to help the 
Norman duke himself to the crown. 

This scene is presented in the volume before us. 
Harold departs and regains England, and there, on 
the king's death, overborne by circumstances, but 
with much tribulation of mind, violates his oath, 
and himself takes possession of the throne. The 
interest of the drama is in a great measure the pic- 
ture of his temptation and remorse, his sense of his 
treachery and of the inevitableness of his chastise- 
ment. With this other matters are mingled: Har- 
old's conflict with his disloyal brother Tostig, Earl 
of Northumberland, who brings in the King of 
Norway to claim the crown, and who, with his Nor- 
wegian backers, is defeated by Harold in battle just 
before William comes down upon him. Then there 
is his love-affair with Edith, ward of the Confessor, 
whom the latter, piously refusing- to hear of his vio- 
lation of his oath, condemns him to put away, as 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 201 

penance for the very thought. There is also his 
marriage with Aldwyth, a designing person, widow 
of a Welsh king whom Harold has defeated, and 
who, having herself through her parentage, strong 
English interests, inveigles Harold into a union 
which may consolidate their forces. 

Altogether, Harold is, for a hero, rather inclined 
to falter and succumb. It is to his conscience, how- 
ever, that he finally succumbs; he loses heart and, 
goes to meet William at Hastings with a depressing 
presentiment of defeat. Mr. Tennyson, however, as 
we gather from a prefatory sonnet, which is per- 
haps finer than anything in the drama itself, holds 
that much can be said for the "Norman-slandered 
hero," and declares that he has nothing to envy 
William if 

" Each stands full face with all he did below." 

Edith, Harold's repudiated lady-love, is, we sup- 
pose, the heroine of the story, inasmuch as she has 
the privilege of expiring upon the corpse of tEe 
hero. Harold's defeat is portrayed through a con- 
versation between Edith and Stigand, the English 
and anti-papal Archbishop of Canterbury, who 
watches the fight at Senlac from a tent near the 
field, while the monks of Waltham, outside, intone 
a Latin invocation to the God of Battles to sweep 
away the Normans. 

The drama closes with a scene on the field, aft 



202 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

the fight, in which Edith and Aldwyth wander 
about, trying to identify Harold among the slain. 
On discovering him they indulge in a few natural 
recriminations, then Edith loses her head and ex- 
pires by his side. William comes in, rubbing his 
hands over his work, and intimates to Aldwyth that 
she may now make herself agreeable to him. She 
replies, hypocritically, "My punishment is more 
than I can bear ' ' ; and with this, the most dramatic 
speech, perhaps in the volume, the play terminates. 
Edith, we should say, is a heroine of the didactic 
order. She has a bad conscience about Harold's 
conduct, and about her having continued on affec- 
tionate terms with him after his diplomatic mar- 
riage with Aldwyth. When she prays for Harold 's 
success she adds that she hopes heaven will not re- 
fuse to listen to her because she loves ' ' the husband 
of another"; and after he is defeated she re- 
proaches herself with having injured his pros- 
pects — 

"For there was more than sister in my kiss." 

Though there are many persons in the poem it 
cannot be said that any of them attains a very vivid 
individuality. Indeed, their great number, the 
drama being of moderate length, hinders the un- 
folding of any one of them. 

Mr. Tennyson, moreover, has not the dramatic 
touch; he rarely finds the phrase or the movement 



TENNYSON'S DRAMA 203 

that illuminates a character, rarely makes the dia- 
logue strike sparks. This is generally mild and 
colourless, and the passages that arrest us, rela- 
tively, owe their relief to juxtaposition rather 
than to any especial possession of the old Tenny- 
sonian energy. Now and then we come upon a few 
lines together in which we seem to catch an echo 
of the author's earlier magic, or sometimes simply 
of his earlier manner. When we do, we make the 
most of them and are grateful. Such, for instance, 
is the phrase of one of the characters describing his 
rescue from shipwreck. He dug his hands, he says, 
into 

" My old fast friend the shore, and clinging thus 
Felt the remorseless outdraught of the deep 
Haul like a great strong fellow at my legs." 

Such are the words in which Wulfnoth, Harold's 
young brother, detained in Normandy, laments his 
situation : 

"Yea, and I 
Shall see the dewy kiss of dawn no more 
Make blush the maiden-white of our tall cliffs, 
Nor mark the sea-bird rouse himself and hover 
Above the windy ripple, and fill the sky 
With free sea-laughter." 

In two or three places the author makes, in a few 
words, a picture, an image, of considerable felicity. 



204 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

Harold wishes that he were like Edward the Con- 
fessor, 

"As holy and as passionless as he! 
That I might rest as calmly ! Look at him — 
The rosy face, and long, down-silvering beard, 
The brows unwrinkled as a summer mere." 

We may add that in the few speeches allotted to 
this monarch of virtuous complexion this portrait 
is agreeably sustained. "Holy, is he?" says the 
Archbishop, Stigand, of him to Harold — 

" A conscience for his own soul, not his realm ; 
A twilight conscience lighted thro' a chink; 
Thine by the sun." 

And the same character hits upon a really vigorous 
image in describing, as he watches them, Harold's 
exploits on the battle-fields : 

"Yea, yea, for how their lances snap and shiver, 
Against the shifting blaze of Harold's axe! 
War-woodman of old Woden, how he fells 
The mortal copse of faces!" 

We feel, after all, in Mr. Tennyson, even in the 
decidedly minor key in which this volume is 
pitched, that he has once known how to turn our 
English poetic phrase as skilfully as any one, and 
that he has not altogether forgotten the art. 



CONTEMPORARY NOTES ON 
WHISTLER VS. RUSKIN 



I. Originally published as an unsigned note in The Na- 
tion, December 19, 1878. The jury allowed Whistler one 
farthing damages. 

II. Originally published as an unsigned note in The Na- 
tion, February 13, 1879. 

The pamphlet here referred to was entitled Whistler 
vs. Ruskin : Art and Art-Critics. London : Chatto & 
Windus. 1878. This essay was afterwards reprinted in 
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, London, 1890. 



CONTEMPORARY NOTES ON WHISTLER vs. 
RUSKIN 

I. THE SUIT FOR LIBEL 

THE London public is never left for many days 
without a cause celebre of some kind. The 
latest novelty in this line has been the suit for 
damages brought against Mr. Ruskin by Mr. James 
Whistler, the American painter, and decided last 
week. Mr. Whistler is very well known in the Lon- 
don world, and his conspicuity, combined with the 
renown of the defendant and the nature of the 
case, made the affair the talk of the moment. All 
the newspapers have had leading articles upon it, 
and people have differed for a few hours more posi- 
tively than it had come to be supposed that they 
could differ about anything save the character of 
the statesmanship of Lord Beaconsfield. The in- 
jury suffered by Mr. Whistler resides in a para- 
graph published more than a year ago in that 
strange monthly manifesto called Fors Clavigera, 
which Mr. Ruskin had for a long time addressed to 
a partly edified, partly irritated, and greatly 
amused public. Mr. Ruskin spoke at some length 
of the pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery, and, fall- 
207 



208 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

ing foul of Mr. Whistler, he alluded to him in these 
terms : 

"For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for 
the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay- 
ought not to have admitted works into the gallery 
in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so 
nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. 
I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence 
before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb 
ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the 
public's face." 

Mr. Whistler alleged that these words were li- 
bellous, and that, coming from a critic of Mr. Rus- 
kin's eminence, they had done him, professionally, 
serious injury; and he asked for £1,000 damage. 
The case had a two days' hearing, and it was a sin- 
gular and most regrettable exhibition. If it had 
taken place in some Western American town, it 
would have been called provincial and barbarous; 
it would have been cited as an incident of a low 
civilisation. Beneath the stately towers of West- 
minster it hardly wore a higher aspect. 

A British jury of ordinary tax-payers was ap- 
pealed to decide whether Mr. Whistler's pictures 
belonged to a high order of art, and what degree 
of "finish" was required to render a picture satis- 
factory. The painter's singular canvases were 
handed about in court, and the counsel for the de- 
fence, holding one of them up, called upon the jury 



WHISTLER VS. BUSKIN 209 

to pronounce whether it was an "accurate repre- 
sentation " of Battersea Bridge. Witnesses were 
summoned on either side to testify to the value of 
Mr. Whistler's productions, and Mr. Ruskin had 
the honour of having his estimate of them substan- 
tiated by Mr. Frith. The weightiest testimony, the 
most intelligently, and apparently the most reluc- 
tantly delivered, was that of Mr. Burne Jones, who 
appeared to appreciate the ridiculous character of 
the process to which he had been summoned (by the 
defence) to contribute, and who spoke of Mr. 
Whistler's performance as only in a partial sense 
of the word pictures — as being beautiful in colour, 
and indicating an extraordinary power of repre- 
senting the atmosphere, but as being also hardly 
more than beginnings, and fatally deficient in fin- 
ish. For the rest the crudity and levity of the 
whole affair were decidedly painful, and few 
things, I think, have lately done more to vulgarise 
the public sense of the character of artistic produc- 
tion. 

The jury gave Mr. Whistler nominal damages. 
The opinion of the newspapers seems to be that he 
has got at least all he deserved — that anything 
more would have been a blow at the liberty of 
criticism. I confess to thinking it hard to decide 
what Mr. Whistler ought properly to have done, 
while — putting aside the degree of one's apprecia- 
tion of his works — I quite understand his resent- 



210 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

ment. Mr. Ruskin 's language quite transgresses 
the decencies of criticism, and he has been laying 
about him for some years past with such promis- 
cuous violence that it gratifies one 's sense of justice 
to see him brought up as a disorderly character. 
On the other hand, he is a chartered libertine — he 
has possessed himself by prescription of the func- 
tion of a general scold. His literary bad manners 
are recognised, and many of his contemporaries 
have suffered from them without complaining. It 
would very possibly, therefore, have been much 
wiser on Mr. Whistler's part to feign indifference. 
Unfortunately, Mr. Whistler's productions are so 
very eccentric and imperfect (I speak here of his 
paintings only; his etchings are quite another af- 
fair, and altogether admirable) that his critic's 
denunciation could by no means fall to the ground 
of itself. I wonder that before a British jury they 
had any chance whatever; they must have been a 
terrible puzzle. 

The verdict, of course, satisfies neither party; 
Mr. Ruskin is formally condemned, but the plain- 
tiff is not compensated. Mr. Ruskin too, doubtless, 
is not gratified at finding that the fullest weight 
of his disapproval is thought to be represented by 
the sum of one farthing. 



WHISTLER VS. BUSKIN 211 



I may mention as a sequel to the brief account 
of the suit Whistler v. Kuskin, which I sent you 
a short time since, that the plaintiff has lately 
published a little pamphlet in which he delivers 
himself on the subject of art-criticism. 

This little pamphlet, issued by Chatto & Windus, 
is an affair of seventeen very prettily-printed small 
pages; it is now in its sixth edition, it sells for a 
shilling, and is to be seen in most of the shop-win- 
dows. It is very characteristic of the painter, and 
highly entertaining ; but I am not sure that it will 
have rendered appreciable service to the cause, 
which he has at heart. The cause that Mr. Whist- 
ler has at heart is the absolute suppression and ex- 
tinction of the art-critic and his function. Accord- 
ing to Mr. Whistler the art-critic is an imperti- 
nence, a nuisance, a monstrosity — and usually, into 
the bargain, an arrant fool. 

Mr. Whistler writes in an off-hand, colloquial 
style, much besprinkled with French — a style which 
might be called familiar if one often encountered 
anything like it. He writes by no means as well as 
he paints ; but his little diatribe against the critics 
is suggestive, apart from the force of anything 
that he specifically urges. The painter's irritated 
feeling is interesting, for it suggests the state of 
mind of many of his brothers of the brush in the 



212 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

presence of the bungling and incompetent disquisi- 
tions of certain members of the fraternity who sit 
in judgment upon their works. 

"Let work be received in silence/ ' says Mr. 
Whistler, "as it was in the days to which the pen- 
man still points as an era when art was at its 
apogee.' ' He is very scornful of the "penman," 
and it is on the general ground of his being a pen- 
man that he deprecates the existence of his late 
adversary, Mr. Ruskin. He does not attempt to 
make out a case in detail against the great com- 
mentator of pictures; it is enough for Mr. Whist- 
ler that he is a " litterateur, ' ' and that a littera- 
teur should concern himself with his own business. 
The author also falls foul of Mr. Tom Taylor, who 
does the reports of the exhibitions in the Times, 
and who had the misfortune, fifteen years ago, to 
express himself rather unintelligently about Velas- 
quez. 

* ' The Observatory at Greenwich under the direc- 
tion of an apothecary," says Mr. Whistler, "the 
College of Physicians with Tennyson as president, 
and we know what madness is about ! But a school 
of art with an accomplished litterateur at its head 
disturbs no one, and is actually what the world 
receives as rational, while Ruskin writes for pupils 
and Colvin holds forth at Cambridge ! Still, quite 
alone stands Ruskin, whose writing is art and whose 



WHISTLER VS. BUSKIN 213 

art is unworthy his writing. To him and his ex- 
ample do we owe the outrage of proffered assistance 
from the unscientific — the meddling of the immod- 
est — the intrusion of the garrulous. Art, that for 
ages has hewn its own history in marble and writ- 
ten its own comments on canvas, shall it suddenly 
stand still and stammer and wait for wisdom from 
the passer-by? — for guidance from the hand that 
holds neither brush nor chisel ? Out upon the shal- 
low conceit! What greater sarcasm can Mr. Rus- 
kin pass upon himself than that he preaches to 
young men what he cannot perform ? Why, unsat- 
isfied with his conscious power, should he choose to 
become the type of incompetency by talking for 
forty years of what he has never done ? ' ' 

Mr. Whistler winds up by pronouncing Mr. Rus- 
kin, of whose writings he has perused, I suspect, an 
infinitesimally small number of pages, "the Peter 
Parley of Painting." This is very far, as I say, 
from exhausting the question ; but it is easy to un- 
derstand the state of mind of a London artist (to 
go no further) who skims through the critiques in 
the local journals. There is no scurrility in saying 
that these are for the most part almost incredibly 
weak and unskilled ; to turn from one of them to a 
critical feuilleton in one of the Parisian journals 
is like passing from a primitive to a very high civil- 
isation. Even, however, if the reviews of pictures 



214 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

were very much better, the protest of the producer 
as against the critic would still have a considerable 
validity. 

Few people will deny that the development of 
criticism in our day has become inordinate, dispro- 
portionate, and that much of what is written under 
that exalted name is very idle and superficial. Mr. 
"Whistler's complaint belongs to the general ques- 
tion, and I am afraid it will never obtain a serious 
hearing, on special and exceptional grounds. The 
whole artistic fraternity is in the same boat — the 
painters, the architects, the poets, the novelists, the 
dramatists, the actors, the musicians, the singers. 
They have a standing, and in many ways a very 
just, quarrel with criticism; but perhaps many of 
them would admit that, on the whole, so long as 
they appeal to a public laden with many cares and 
a great variety of interests, it gratifies as much as 
it displeases them. Art is one of the necessities of 
life ; but even the critics themselves would probably 
not assert that criticism is anything more than an 
agreeable luxury — something like printed talk. If 
it be said that they claim too much in calling it 
" agreeable ' ' to the criticised, it may be added in 
their behalf that they probably mean agreeable in 
the long run. 



A NOTE ON JOHN BURROUGHS 



An unsigned review of Winter Sunshine. By John 
Burroughs. New York: Hurd & Houghton. 1876. Orig- 
inally published in The Nation, January 27, 1876. 



A NOTE ON JOHN BURROUGHS 

THIS is a very charming little book. "We had 
noticed, on their appearance in various peri- 
odicals, some of the articles of which it is composed, 
and we find that, read continuously, they have 
given us even more pleasure. We have, indeed, en- 
joyed them more perhaps than we can show suffi- 
cient cause for. They are slender and light, but 
they have a real savour of their own. 

Mr. Burroughs is known as an out-of-door ob- 
server — a devotee of birds and trees and fields and 
aspects of weather and humble wayside incidents. 
The minuteness of his observation, the keenness of 
his perception of all these things, give him a real 
originality which is confirmed by a style sometimes 
indeed idiomatic and unfinished to a fault, but 
capable of remarkable felicity and vividness. Mr. 
Burroughs is also, fortunately for his literary pros- 
perity in these days, a decided "humourist"; he 
is essentially and genially an American, without at 
all posing as one, and his sketches have a delightful 
oddity, vivacity, and freshness. 

The first half of his volume, and the least sub- 
217 



218 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

stantial, treats of certain rambles taken in the win- 
ter and spring in the country around Washington ; 
the author is an apostle of pedestrianism, and these 
pages form a prolonged rhapsody upon the pleas- 
ures within the reach of any one who will take the 
trouble to stretch his legs. They are full of 
charming touches, and indicate a real genius for 
the observation of natural things. Mr. Burroughs 
is a sort of reduced, but also more humourous, 
more available, and more sociable Thoreau. He is 
especially intimate with the birds, and he gives his 
reader an acute sense of how sociable an affair, dur- 
ing six months of the year, this feathery lore may 
make a lonely walk. He is also intimate with the 
question of apples, and he treats of it in a succu- 
lent disquisition which imparts to the somewhat 
trivial theme a kind of lyrical dignity. He re- 
marks, justly, that women are poor apple-eaters. 

But the best pages in his book are those which 
commemorate a short visit to England and the rap- 
ture of his first impressions. This little sketch, in 
spite of its extreme slightness, really deserves to 
become classical. We have read far solider treat- 
ises which contained less of the essence of the mat- 
ter; or at least, if it is not upon the subject itself 
that Mr. Burroughs throws particularly powerful 
light, it is the essence of the ideal traveller's spirit 
that he gives us, the freshness and intensity of im- 
pression, the genial bewilderment, the universal 



A NOTE ON JOHN BURROUGHS 219 

appreciativeness. All this is delightfully naif, 
frank, and natural. 

"All this had been told, and it pleased me so in 
the seeing that I must tell it again," the author 
says; and this is the constant spirit of his talk. 
He appears to have been "pleased" as no man was 
ever pleased before ; so much so that his reflections 
upon his own country sometimes become unduly in- 
vidious. But if to be appreciative is the traveller's 
prime duty, Mr. Burroughs is a prince of travel- 
lers. 

1 ' Then to remember that it was a new sky and a 
new earth I was beholding, that it was England, 
the old mother at last, no longer a faith or a fable 
but an actual fact, there before my eyes and under 
my feet — why should I not exult? Go to! I will 
be indulged. These trees, those fields, that bird 
darting along the hedge-rows, those men and boys 
picking blackberries in October, those English flow- 
ers by the roadside (stop the carriage while I leap 
out and pluck them), the homely domestic look of 
things, those houses, those queer vehicles, those 
thick-coated horses, those big-footed, coarsely-clad, 
clear-skinned men and women; this massive, 
homely, compact architecture — let me have a good 
look, for this is my first hour in England, and I 
am drunk with the joy of seeing! This house-fly 
let me inspect it, and that swallow skimming along 
so familiarly." 



220 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

One envies Mr. Burroughs his acute relish of the 
foreign spectacle even more than one enjoys his ex- 
pression of it. He is not afraid to start and stare ; 
his state of mind is exactly opposed to the high 
dignity of the nil admirari. When he goes into St. 
Paul's, "my companions rushed about," he says, 
1 1 as if each one had a search-warrant in his pocket ; 
but I was content to uncover my head and drop 
into a seat, and busy my mind with some simple 
object near at hand, while the sublimity that soared 
about me stole into my soul." He meets a little 
girl carrying a pail in a meadow near Stratford, 
stops her and talks with her, and finds an ineffable 
delight in ' ' the sweet and novel twang of her words. 
Her family had emigrated to America, failed to 
prosper, and come back; but I hardly recognise 
even the name of my own country in her innocent 
prattle; it seemed like a land of fable — all had a 
remote mythological air, and I pressed my en- 
quiries as if I was hearing of this strange land for 
the first time." 

Mr. Burroughs is unfailingly complimentary; he 
sees sermons in stones and good in everything; the 
somewhat dusky British world was never steeped 
in so intense a glow of rose-colour. Sometimes his 
optimism rather interferes with his accuracy — as 
when he detects "forests and lakes" in Hyde Park, 
and affirms that the English rural landscape does 
not, in comparison with the American, appear 



A NOTE ON JOHN BURROUGHS 221 

highly populated. This latter statement is appar- 
ently made apropos of that long stretch of subur- 
ban scenery, pure and simple, which extends from 
Liverpool to London. It does not strike us as fe- 
licitous, either, to say that women are more kindly 
treated in England than in the United States, and 
especially that they are less " leered at." "Leer- 
ing" at women is happily less common all the world 
over than it is sometimes made to appear for pic- 
turesque purposes in the magazines ; but we should 
say that if there is a country where the art has not 
reached a high stage of development, it is our own. 
It must be added that although Mr. Burroughs 
is shrewd as well as naif, the latter quality some- 
times distances the former. He runs over for a 
week to France. "At Dieppe I first saw the 
wooden shoe, and heard its dry, senseless clatter 
upon the pavement. How suggestive of the 
cramped and inflexible conditions with which hu- 
man nature has borne so long in these lands ! ' ' But 
in Paris also he is appreciative — singularly so for 
so complete an outsider as he confesses himself to 
be — and throughout he is very well worth reading. 
We heartily commend his little volume for its hon- 
esty, its individuality, and, in places, its really 
blooming freshness. 



ME. KIPLING'S EARLY STOEIES 



Originally published as an Introduction to the Conti- 
nental edition of Soldiers Three. By Rudyard Kipling; 
volume 59 of the English Library, Leipzig, Heinemann and 
Balestier Limited, London. 1891. 



MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES 

IT would be difficult to answer the general ques- 
tion whether the books of the world grow, as 
they multiply, as much better as one might suppose 
they ought, with such a lesson of wasteful experi- 
ment spread perpetually behind them. There is no 
doubt, however, that in one direction we profit 
largely by this education : whether or not we have 
become wiser to fashion, we have certainly become 
keener to enjoy. We have acquired the sense of a 
particular quality which is precious beyond all oth- 
ers — so precious as to make us wonder where, at such 
a rate, our posterity will look for it, and how they 
will pay for it. After tasting many essences we 
find freshness the sweetest of all. We yearn for it, 
we watch for it and lie in wait for it, and when we 
catch it on the wing (it flits by so fast) we cele- 
brate our capture with extravagance. We feel that 
after so much has come and gone it is more and 
more of a feat and a tour de force to be fresh. The 
tormenting part of the phenomenon is that, in any 
particular key, it can happen but once — by a sad 
failure of the law that inculcates the repetition of 
goodness. It is terribly a matter of accident ; emu- 
225 



226 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

lation and imitation have a fatal effect upon it. It 
is easy to see, therefore, what importance the epi- 
cure may attach to the brief moment of its bloom. 
While that lasts we all are epicures. 

This helps to explain, I think, the unmistakeable 
intensity of the general relish for Mr. Rudyard 
Kipling. His bloom lasts, from month to month, 
almost surprisingly — by which I mean that he has 
not worn out even by active exercise the particular 
property that made us all, more than a year ago, 
so precipitately drop everything else to attend to 
him. He has many others which he will doubtless 
always keep ; but a part of the potency attaching to 
his freshness, what makes it as exciting as a drawing 
of lots, is our instinctive conviction that he cannot, 
in the nature of things, keep that ; so that our en- 
joyment of him, so long as the miracle is still 
wrought, has both the charm of confidence and the 
charm of suspense. And then there is the further 
charm, with Mr. Kipling, that this same freshness 
is such a very strange affair of its kind — so mixed 
and various and cynical, and, in certain lights, so 
contradictory of itself. The extreme reeentness of 
his inspiration is as enviable as the tale is startling 
that his productions tell of his being at home, do- 
mesticated and initiated, in this wicked and weary 
world. At times he strikes us as shockingly preco- 
cious, at others as serenely wise. On the whole, he 
presents himself as a strangely clever youth who 



MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES 227 

has stolen the formidable mask of maturity and 
rushes about, making people jump with the deep 
sounds, and sportive exaggerations of tone, that 
issue from its painted lips. He has this mark of 
a real vocation, that different spectators may like 
him — must like him, I should almost say — for dif- 
ferent things; and this refinement of attraction, 
that to those who reflect even upon their pleasures 
he has as much to say as to those who never reflect 
upon anything. Indeed there is a certain amount 
of room for surprise in the fact that, being so much 
the sort of figure that the hardened critic likes to 
meet, he should also be the sort of figure that in- 
spires the multitude with confidence — for a com- 
plicated air is, in general, the last thing that does 
this. 

By the critic who likes to meet such a bristling 
adventurer as Mr. Kipling I mean, of course, the 
critic for whom the happy accident of character, 
whatever form it may take, is more of a bribe to 
interest than the promise of some character cher- 
ished in theory — the appearance of justifying some 
foregone conclusion as to what a writer or a book 
' ' ought, ' ' in the Ruskinian sense, to be ; the critic, 
in a word, who has, a priori, no rule for a literary 
production but that it shall have genuine life. 
Such a critic (he gets much more out of his oppor- 
tunities, I think, than the other sort) likes a writer 
exactly in proportion as he is a challenge, an appeal 



228 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

to interpretation, intelligence, ingenuity, to what is 
elastic in the critical mind — in proportion indeed as 
he may be a negation of things familiar and taken 
for granted. He feels in this case how much more 
play and sensation there is for himself. 

Mr. Kipling, then, has the character that fur- 
nishes plenty of play and of vicarious experience — 
that makes any perceptive reader foresee a rare lux- 
ury. He has the great merit of being a compact and 
convenient illustration of the surest source of inter- 
est in any painter of life — that of having an ident- 
ity as marked as a window-frame. He is one of the 
illustrations, taken near at hand, that help to clear 
up the vexed question in the novel or the tale, of 
kinds, camps, schools, distinctions, the right way 
and the wrong way ; so very positively does he con- 
tribute to the showing that there are just as many 
kinds, as many ways, as many forms and degrees 
of the " right," as there are personal points in 
view. It is the blessing of the art he practises that 
it is made up of experience conditioned, infinitely, 
in this personal way — the sum of the feeling of life 
as reproduced by innumerable natures; natures 
that feel through all their differences, testify 
through their diversities. These differences, which 
make the identity, are of the individual ; they form 
the channel by which life flows through him, and 
how much he is able to give us of life — in other 



MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES 229 

words, how much he appeals to us — depends on 
whether they form it solidly. 

This hardness of the conduit, cemented with a 
rare assurance, is perhaps the most striking idio- 
syncrasy of Mr. Kipling; and what makes it more 
remarkable is that incident of his extreme youth 
which, if we talk about him at all, we cannot affect 
to ignore. I cannot pretend to give a biography 
or a chronology of the author of ' ' Soldiers Three, ' ' 
but I cannot overlook the general, the importunate 
fact that, confidently as he has caught the trick and 
habit of this sophisticated world, he has not been 
long of it. His extreme youth is indeed what I 
may call his window-bar — the support on which he 
somewhat rowdily leans while he looks down at the 
human scene with his pipe in his teeth ; just as his 
other conditions (to mention only some of them), 
are his prodigious facility, which is only less re- 
markable than his stiff selection ; his unabashed tem- 
perament, his flexible talent, his smoking-room man- 
ner, his familiar friendship with India — established 
so rapidly, and so completely under his control ; his 
delight in battle, his ' * cheek " about women — and 
indeed about men and about everything; his de- 
termination not to be duped, his " imperial' ' fibre, 
his love of the inside view, the private soldier and 
the primitive man. I must add further to this list 
of attractions the remarkable way in which he 



230 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

makes us aware that he has been put up to the 
whole thing directly by life (miraculously, in his 
teens), and not by the communications of others. 
These elements, and many more, constitute a singu- 
larly robust little literary character (our use of the 
diminutive is altogether a note of endearment and 
enjoyment) which, if it has the rattle of high spirits 
and is in no degree apologetic or shrinking, yet 
offers a very liberal pledge in the way of good 
faith and immediate performance. Mr. Kipling's 
performance comes off before the more circumspect 
have time to decide whether they like him or not, 
and if you have seen it once you will be sure to re- 
turn to the show. He makes us prick up our ears 
to the good news that in the smoking-room too there 
may be artists; and indeed to an intimation still 
more refined — that the latest development of the 
modern also may be, most successfully, for the 
canny artist to put his victim off his guard by imi- 
tating the amateur (superficially, of course) to the 
life. 

These, then, are some of the reasons why Mr. 
Kipling may be dear to the analyst as well as, M. 
Renan says, to the simple. The simple may like 
him because he is wonderful about India, and India 
has not been ' ' done ' ' ; while there is plenty left for 
the morbid reader in the surprises of his skill and 
the fioriture of his form, which are so oddly inde- 
pendent of any distinctively literary note in him, 



MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES 231 

any bookish association. It is as one of the morbid 
that the writer of these remarks (which doubtless 
only too shamefully betray his character) exposes 
himself as most consentingly under the spell. The 
freshness arising from a subject that — by a good 
fortune I do not mean to underestimate — has never 
been "done," is after all less of an affair to build 
upon than the freshness residing in the temper of 
the artist. Happy indeed is Mr. Kipling, who can 
command so much of both kinds. It is still as one 
of the morbid, no doubt — that is, as one of those 
who are capable of sitting up all night for a new 
impression of talent, of scouring the trodden field 
for one little spot of green — that I find our young 
author quite most curious in his air, and not only 
in his air, but in his evidently very real sense, of 
knowing his way about life. Curious in the high- 
est degree and well worth attention is such an idio- 
syncrasy as this in a young Anglo-Saxon. We 
meet it with familiar frequency in the budding tal- 
ents of France, and it startles and haunts us for an 
hour. After an hour, however, the mystery is apt 
to fade, for we find that the wondrous initiation 
is not in the least general, is only exceedingly spe- 
cial, and is, even with this limitation, very often 
rather conventional. In a word, it is with the 
ladies that the young Frenchman takes his ease, 
and more particularly with the ladies selected ex- 
pressly to make this attitude convincing. When 



232 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

they have let him off, the dimnesses too often en- 
compass him. But for Mr. Kipling there are no 
dimnesses anywhere, and if the ladies are indeed 
violently distinct they are not only strong notes in 
a universal loudness. This loudness fills the ears 
of Mr. Kipling's admirers (it lacks sweetness, no 
doubt, for those who are not of the number), and 
there is really only one strain that is absent from it 
— the voice, as it were, of the civilised man; in 
whom I of course also include the civilised woman. 
But this is an element that for the present one does 
not miss — every other note is so articulate and di- 
rect. 

It is a part of the satisfaction the author gives us 
that he can make us speculate as to whether he will 
be able to complete his picture altogether (this is 
as far as we presume to go in meddling with the 
question of his future) without bringing in the 
complicated soul. On the day he does so, if he 
handles it with anything like the cleverness he has 
already shown, the expectation of his friends will 
take a great bound. Meanwhile, at any rate, we 
have Mulvaney, and Mulvaney is after all tolerably 
complicated. He is only a six-foot saturated Irish 
private, but he is a considerable pledge of more to 
come. Hasn't he, for that matter, the tongue of a 
hoarse siren, and hasn't he also mysteries and in- 
finitudes almost Carlylese? Since I am speaking 
of him I may as well say that, as an evocation, he 



MB. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES 233 

has probably led captive those of Mr. Kipling's 
readers who have most given up resistance.* He is 
a piece of portraiture of the largest, vividest kind, 
growing and growing on the painter's hands with- 
out ever outgrowing them. I can 't help regarding 
him, in a certain sense, as Mr. Kipling's tutelary 
deity — a landmark in the direction in which it is 
open to him to look furthest. If the author will only 
go as far in this direction as Mulvaney is capable of 
taking him (and the inimitable Irishman is like Vol- 
taire's Habakkuk, capable de tout) he may still dis- 
cover a treasure and find a reward for the services 
he has rendered the winner of Dinah Shadd. I 
hasten to add that the truly appreciative reader 
should surely have no quarrel with the primitive 
element in Mr. Kipling's subject-matter, or with 
what, for want of a better name, I may call his love 
of low life. What is that but essentially a part of 
his freshness? And for what part of his fresh- 
ness are we exactly more thankful than for just 
this smart jostle that he gives the old stupid super- 
stition that the amiability of a story-teller is the 
amiability of the people he represents — that their 
vulgarity, or depravity, or gentility, or fatuity are 
tantamount to the same qualities in the painter 
itself ? A blow from which, apparently, it will not 
easily recover is dealt this infantine philosophy by 
Mr. Howells when, with the most distinguished dex- 
terity and all the detachment of a master, he 



234 EARLY VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

handles some of the clumsiest, crudest, most human 
things in life — answering surely thereby the play- 
goers in the sixpenny gallery who howl at the rep- 
resentative of the villain when he comes before the 
curtain. 

Nothing is more refreshing than this active, dis- 
interested sense of the real; it is doubtless the 
quality for the want of more of which our English 
and American fiction has turned so wofully stale. 
We are ridden by the old conventionalities of type 
and small proprieties of observance — by the fool- 
ish baby-formula (to put it sketchily) of the pic- 
ture and the subject. Mr. Kipling has all the air 
of being disposed to lift the whole business off the 
nursery carpet, and of being perhaps even more 
able than he is disposed. One must hasten of 
course to parenthesise that there is not, intrin- 
sically, a bit more luminosity in treating of low 
life and of primitive man than of those whom civil- 
isation has kneaded to a finer paste: the only 
luminosity in either case is in the intelligence with 
which the thing is done. But it so happens that, 
among ourselves, the frank, capable outlook, when 
turned upon the vulgar majority, the coarse, re- 
ceding edges of the social perspective, borrows a 
charm from being new; such a charm as, for in- 
stance, repetition has already despoiled it of 
among the French — the hapless French who pay 
the penalty as well as enjoy the glow of living in- 



MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES 235 

tellectually so much faster than we. It is the most 
inexorable part of our fate that we grow tired of 
everything, and of course in due time we may 
grow tired even of what explorers shall come back 
to tell us about the great grimy condition, or, with 
unprecedented items and details, about the gray 
middle state which darkens into it. But the ex- 
plorers, bless them! may have a long day before 
that; it is early to trouble about reactions, so that 
we must give them the benefit of every presump- 
tion. We are thankful for any boldness and any 
sharp curiosity, and that is why we are thankful 
for Mr. Kipling's general spirit and for most of 
his excursions. 

Many of these, certainly, are into a region not 
to be designated as superficially dim, though in- 
deed the author always reminds us that India is 
above all the land of mystery. A large part of his 
high spirits, and of ours, comes doubtless from the 
amusement of such vivid, heterogeneous material, 
from the irresistible magic of scorching suns, sub- 
ject empires, uncanny religions, uneasy garrisons 
and smothered-up women — from heat and colour 
and danger and dust. India is a portentous im- 
age, and we are duly awed by the familiarities it 
undergoes at Mr. Kipling's hand and by the fine 
impunity, the sort of fortune that favours the 
brave, of his want of awe. An abject humility is 
not his strong point, but he gives us something in- 



236 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

stead of it — vividness and drollery, the vision and 
the thrill of many things, the misery and strange- 
ness of most, the personal sense of a hundred queer 
contacts and risks. And then in the absence of 
respect he has plenty of knowledge, and if knowl- 
edge should fail him he would have plenty of in- 
vention. Moreover, if invention should ever fail 
him, he would still have the lyric string and the 
patriotic chord, on which he plays admirably; so 
that it may be said he is a man of resources. What 
he gives us, above all, is the feeling of the English 
manner and the English blood in conditions they 
have made at once so much and so little their own ; 
with manifestations grotesque enough in some of 
his satiric sketches and deeply impressive in some 
of his anecdotes of individual responsibility. 

His Indian impressions divide themselves into 
three groups, one of which, I think, very much 
outshines the others. First to be mentioned are the 
tales of native life, curious glimpses of custom and 
superstition, dusky matters not beholden of the 
many, for which the author has a remarkable flair. 
Then comes the social, the Anglo-Indian episode, 
the study of administrative and military types, 
and of the wonderful rattling, riding ladies who, 
at Simla and more desperate stations, look out for 
husbands and lovers; often, it would seem, and 
husbands and lovers of others. The most brilliant 
group is devoted wholly to the common soldier, and 



MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES 237 

of this series it appears to me that too much good 
is hardly to be said. Here Mr. Kipling, with all 
his off-handedness, is a master ; for we are held not 
so much by the greater or less oddity of the par- 
ticular yarn — sometimes it is scarcely a yarn at 
all, but something much less artificial — as by the 
robust attitude of the narrator, who never arranges 
or glosses or falsifies, but makes straight for the 
common and the characteristic. I have mentioned 
the great esteem in which I hold Mulvaney — surely 
a charming man and one qualified to adorn a higher 
sphere. Mulvaney is a creation to be proud of, 
and his two comrades stand as firm on their legs. 
In spite of Mulvaney 's social possibilities, they 
are all three finished brutes; but it is precisely in 
the finish that we delight. Whatever Mr. Kipling 
may relate about them forever will encounter read- 
ers equally fascinated and unable fully to justify 
their faith. 

Are not those literary pleasures after all the 
most intense which are the most perverse and whim- 
sical, and even indefensible? There is a logic in 
them somewhere, but it often lies below the plum- 
met of criticism. The spell may be weak in a 
writer who has every reasonable and regular claim, 
and it may be irresistible in one who presents him- 
self with a style corresponding to a bad hat. A 
good hat is better than a bad one, but a conjuror 
may wear either. Many a reader will never be 



238 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

able to say what secret human force lays its hand 
upon him when Private Ortheris, having sworn 
"quietly into the blue sky," goes mad with home- 
sickness by the yellow river and raves for the 
basest sights and sounds of London. I can scarcely 
tell why I think "The Courting of Dinah Shadd" 
a masterpiece (though, indeed, I can make a 
shrewd guess at one of the reasons), nor would it 
be worth while perhaps to attempt to defend the 
same pretension in regard to "On Greenhow 
Hill" — much less to trouble the tolerant reader of 
these remarks with a statement of how many more 
performances in the nature of "The End of the 
Passage" (quite admitting even that they might 
not represent Mr. Kipling at his best) I am con- 
scious of a latent relish for. One might as well 
admit while one is about it that one has wept pro- 
fusely over "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," 
the history of the "Dutch courage" of two dread- 
ful dirty little boys, who, in the face of Afghans 
scarcely more dreadful, saved the reputation of 
their regiment and perished, the least mawkishly 
in the world, in a squalor of battle incomparably 
expressed. People who know how peaceful they 
are themselves and have no bloodshed to reproach 
themselves with needn't scruple to mention the 
glamour that Mr. Kipling's intense militarism has 
for them, and how astonishing and contagious they 
find it, in spite of the unromantic complexion of it 



MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES 239 

— the way it bristles with all sorts of ugliness and 
technicalities. Perhaps that is why I go all the 
way even with "The Gadsbys" — the Gadsbys were 
so connected (uncomfortably, it is true) with the 
army. There is fearful fighting — or a fearful 
danger of it— in "The Man Who Would be King"; 
is that the reason we are deeply affected by this 
extraordinary tale? It is one of them, doubtless, 
for Mr. Kipling has many reasons, after all, on his 
side, though they don't equally call aloud to be 
uttered. 

One more of them, at any rate, I must add to 
these unsystematised remarks — it is the one I spoke 
of a shrewd guess at in alluding to "The Courting 
of Dinah Shadd." The talent that produces such 
a tale is a talent eminently in harmony with the 
short story, and the short story is, on our side of 
the Channel and of the Atlantic, a mine which will 
take a great deal of working. Admirable is the 
clearness with which Mr. Kipling perceives this — 
perceives what innumerable chances it gives, 
chances of touching life in a thousand different 
places, taking it up in innumerable pieces, each a 
specimen and an illustration. In a word, he ap- 
preciates the episode, and there are signs to show 
that this shrewdness will, in general, have long in- 
nings. It will find the detachable, compressible 
"case" an admirable, flexible form; the cultivation 
of which may well add to the mistrust already en- 



240 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 

tertained by Mr. Kipling, if his manner does not 
betray him, for what is clumsy and tasteless in the 
time-honoured practice of the "plot." It will for- 
tify him in the conviction that the vivid picture 
has a greater communicative value than the Chi- 
nese puzzle. There is little enough "plot" in such 
a perfect little piece of hard representation as 
"The End of the Passage," to cite again only the 
most salient of twenty examples. 

But I am speaking of our author's future, which 
is the luxury that I meant to forbid myself — pre- 
cisely because the subject is so tempting. There is 
nothing in the world (for the prophet) so charm- 
ing as to prophesy, and as there is nothing so incon- 
clusive the tendency should be repressed in pro- 
portion as the opportunity is good. There is a 
certain want of courtesy to a peculiarly contem- 
poraneous present even in speculating, with a dozen 
differential precautions, on the question of what 
will become in the later hours of the day of a 
talent that has got up so early. Mr. Kipling's 
actual performance is like a tremendous walk be- 
fore breakfast, making one welcome the idea of the 
meal, but consider with some alarm the hours still 
to be traversed. Yet if his breakfast is all to come, 
the indications are that he will be more active 
than ever after he has had it. Among these indi- 
cations are the unflagging character of his pace 
and the excellent form, as they say in athletic 



MR. KIPLING'S EARLY STORIES 241 

circles, in which he gets over the ground. We 
don't detect him stumbling; on the contrary, he 
steps out quite as briskly as at first, and still more 
firmly. There is something zealous and crafts- 
man-like in him which shows that he feels both 
joy and responsibility. A whimsical, wanton 
reader, haunted by a recollection of all the good 
things he has seen spoiled; by a sense of the mis- 
erable, or, at any rate, the inferior, in so many 
continuations and endings, is almost capable of 
perverting poetic justice to the idea that it would 
be even positively well for so surprising a pro- 
ducer to remain simply the fortunate, suggestive, 
unconfirmed and unqualified representative of what 
he has actually done. We can always refer to that. 



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